The U.S. Senate is preparing to vote on Donald Trump’s nomination of Todd Blanche for Attorney General. This comes after Sens. John Cornyn (R-TX) and Thom Tillis (R-NC) caved to Trump and voted to advance Blanche’s nomination out of the Senate Judiciary Committee. They had expressed seemingly sincere concerns about Blanche’s willingness to weaponize the Justice Department by creating a “payout pot for punks,” an understated alliteration for Trump’s effort to enrich the violent thugs who attacked Capitol Police on Jan. 6 on his behalf. [In the dark of night, while this post was in queue for publication, the Senate voted 50-49 to confirm Blanche.]

Subscribe now

But at the end of the day, with Trump on the ropes, Cornyn and Tillis folded. Instead of standing tall, they negotiated a totally unenforceable deal with Blanche–a way to save face while continuing to do Trump’s bidding, even though he effectively ended their Senate careers and Blanche has been a walking disaster at DOJ.

What craven cowards!

They could have redeemed themselves by standing firm on their legitimate objections to Trump’s Acting Attorney General behaving like his personal attorney. Blanche brazenly signed off on a plainly collusive agreement that uses the Justice Department to enrich Trump’s violent co-conspirators in his efforts to subvert the votes of the American people in the 2020 presidential election. It also seeks to protect–and enrich–Trump from any DOJ or other agency investigations into wrongdoing by him, his family, or his businesses over the past several years.

Cornyn and Tills accepted Blanche’s claim that the $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization fund is dead. But they did nothing to prevent the federal government’s “Judgment Fund” from continuing to enrich Trump’s guilty gang.

And there’s another problem. As Cornyn himself pointed out during Blanche’s hearing, the agreement between DOJ and Trump’s other lawyers says it cannot be modified without the signatures of both parties. Federal Judge Kathleen Williams, however, rebuked the agreement and said it should be considered void since it was non-adversarial. In other words, as Trump himself conceded, it was Trump negotiating with Trump for whatever Trump wants.

New features to Boost your digital program

Introducing Action Network Boost, a new add-on package built to take sophisticated digital programs to the next level. AI-informed reporting insights, new tools for cross-team collaboration, deliverability expertise, priority support, and much, much more. Learn more & get 10% off Boost here >

Blanche was and is the vehicle for getting that dirty deal done. And what a vehicle he is–he’s everything any mobster could want in a lawyer doing his bidding.

It’s just not the job of the Attorney General.

Worse, Blanche doesn’t need a special “Anti-Weaponization” fund to reward Trump loyalists with money. The Judgment Fund already exists and has been used to reward millions of dollars to bad people who have done bad things in pursuit of Trump’s agenda.

Blanche’s DOJ gave more than $5 million to the family of Ashli Babbitt who tried to force herself through the glass protecting the House chamber in her violent effort to block our votes from being counted on Jan. 6. A court previously found that the officer who shot her did not violate the law while defending the Members of Congress sheltered in the Chamber. Yet, Blanche rewarded her violence with millions.

On his watch, DOJ also paid out over $1.2 million to Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russian agents in 2016 and later urged Trump to declare martial law to stay in power and redo the 2020 election. The not-so-funny thing is that the Treasury Department’s public disclosures of settlements paid in March do not list Flynn, his attorneys, or even that amount. Who knows how many other Trump loyalists have already reaped big rewards courtesy of Blanche’s sycophancy–or will in the years ahead.

Thank goodness Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington has sued the Treasury Department over its redaction of the names of some settlement recipients. What most people don’t know is that due to federal liability for an array of negligence–from failing to clear icy sidewalks to polluting drinking wells on military bases–the government quietly pays out over $2 billion a year to settle cases. Blanche and Trump tried to ensure that nearly that amount went specifically to the Jan. 6 offenders Trump pardoned. But killing their special fund doesn’t solve the underlying problem: there’s nothing in the current law to prevent such payoffs from continuing through the general Judgment Fund.

And that’s not all.

Cornyn and Tillis also traded their no votes for an unenforceable statement from Blanche that the immunity he gave Trump only applies retroactively. They agreed to this even as news was breaking that Capital One had debanked Trump in 2021 due to serious concerns that transactions processed by his accounts fit patterns associated with money laundering. Based on its experts’ assessment, Capital One told Trump that he needed to move more than 300 accounts to another bank, and then Trump sued them.

Despite all this, Cornyn and Tillis caved on Blanche’s nomination. So did Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA). This lame duck trio, pushed out of office by Trump, could not find it in themselves to oppose his unfit AG nominee as a swan song. Lame does not even begin to describe their cowardice. They’ve each got plenty of money in the bank to retire on, but still could not muster one final stand against Blanche and Trump. Only Susan Collins (R-ME), who is up this year, and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), who is up in 2028, have signaled they will join Democrats in voting no on Blanche, who is not yet done weaponizing DOJ to serve Trump’s vindictive and venal interests.

Cornyn claimed he lacked the power to rein in Trump–even though voting “no” was entirely within his power.

But, We the People have power too. This November, we can vote up and down the ballot to elect representatives who will stand up to Trump–and to his criminal and civil defense lawyer acting as Attorney General.

Cornyn and other Trump lackeys won’t save us. It’s up to us to vote and make sure our votes are counted.

Share

What I’m Reading or Rereading:

• This PBS lesson guide on the Voting Rights Act

  • August 6 marked the 61st anniversary of the passage of the Voting Rights Act, the landmark law John Roberts has sought to destroy.

• Judge Mehta’s criticism over the Blanche DOJ’s motion to dismiss the seditious conspiracy charges against Stewart Rhodes, a so-called Oath Keeper who actively sought to block the peaceful transition of power to aid Trump’s illegitimate claims on Jan. 6.

  • Judge Mehta noted that Rhodes had been called an “ongoing threat and peril” to the United States and lamented DOJ’s effort to rewrite history by dismissing the well-founded charges against him and others.

• The court motion filed by Capital One in response to Trump’s suit against the company for debanking him.

  • In it, the company discusses how a pattern of suspicious transactions in 2021 led it to conclude that banking with Trump was too risky to continue.

  ---

New features to Boost your digital program

Introducing Action Network Boost, a new add-on package built to take sophisticated digital programs to the next level. AI-informed reporting insights, new tools for cross-team collaboration, deliverability expertise, priority support, and much, much more. Learn more & get 10% off Boost here >

The Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Donald Trump’s nomination of Todd Blanche to be the Attorney General of the United States provides a disturbing snapshot of just about everything that is wrong with Washington, DC.

Trumpism has always been a sort of gravitational field that distorts reality to feed the black hole of Trump’s monstrously needy ego, but watching it warp the law itself–including the very government agency charged with enforcing it–is especially jarring. It’s not that the Justice Department is perfect or has always been led by the best minds. It’s that America has never witnessed anything like having someone akin to a mob lawyer at its helm.

Subscribe now

In any other Congress not so servile to Trump, Blanche would never have received a confirmation hearing in the first place. His actions as Acting Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General would have disqualified him for this promotion.

To be fair, I never expected Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), the 94-year-old chair of the Judiciary Committee, to do the right thing. His schtick of supposedly being a watchdog on government overreach is well past its expiration date. He is willfully blind to all the damage Blanche has already done to the American people and to DOJ. He’s been staffed by flamethrowers for years, by his own choice, and is there to deliver whatever Trump wants, even as the president’s reckless policies have harmed Iowa farmers so badly that he had to raid other taxpayers’ dollars to stanch the bleeding.

Among the Republican lawyers on the dais, only Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) had the guts to condemn the despicable deal Blanche tried to cut with and for Trump. Even then, he approached the breadth of the document Blanche himself signed–giving Trump immunity “FOREVER” for any violations of our tax laws to date and much more–as a technical legal question rather than the outright condemnation it deserves.

Now whether Cornyn is doing this out of the goodness of his heart or because Trump endorsed his primary challenger, effectively killing his re-election bid and his tenure in Congress—or both—we may never know. Still, I applaud his willingness to object and I hope he doesn’t cave. He’s right to raise the alarm and he could help protect America from the Leopold-and-Loeb-like duo of Trump and Blanche, who have essentially kidnapped the rule of law and are executing it. Executing as in killing it–not faithfully carrying it out.

Then there’s Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC). Like Grassley, he claimed the Biden administration weaponized DOJ against Trump and criticized Democrats for not objecting. But reality tells a different story. Joe Biden’s Attorney General, Merrick Garland, dragged his feet in response to what Trump unleashed on the Capitol on January 6th. Only after the bipartisan January 6 Select Committee unveiled its detailed findings did Garland finally appoint a special counsel–independent of him and President Biden–to look into the matter and consider criminal charges. The evidence showed those charges were well grounded, unlike a photo of seashells.

I also hope Tillis doesn’t let Blanche get away with checking a box simply by meeting with a group of Epstein survivors. Blanche’s actions toward those survivors, compared with his treatment of convicted sex offender Ghislaine Maxwell, make clear who matters more to those doing Trump’s bidding.

Overall, the Democrats on the Committee stood up to Blanche and detailed the truly many ways he has disqualified himself from serving as AG. Still, some were far too gentle and genteel, as though the Senate were still the storied institution of a past that never existed. It’s a small point, but publicly thanking Blanche for meeting with you makes you sound like the supplicant rather than the person evaluating his fitness for the job. Blanche should consider himself lucky that you are even giving him the time of day after all the havoc he has wreaked. Most Americans want you to stand tall in righteously condemning his actions.

Supercharge your program with Action Network Boost

Powerful features for the most advanced digital programs, including deliverability reporting, priority support, a new way to dig deeper into your data, simplified email customization, and much, much more. Sign up and get 10% off Boost here >

The thing most jarring to me is the same thing that has been jarring me for years from people like Blanche: how easily they bend or break the truth.

I remember the first time I personally watched Sen. Lindsey Graham lie out loud about a judicial nomination issue, while I served as the Chief Counsel for nominations on the Senate Judiciary Committee. This was just a few years after Graham sought to impeach Bill Clinton for lying about his sexual relationships. I vividly recall seeing Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) say one thing off camera, then confidently lie and say the exact opposite once the recording light came on. And, then there is the endless lie machine in the White House, at the White House Correspondents Dinner, on airport tarmacs, and virtually everywhere else.

Day after day, we are swimming in a pool of lies–big lies, small lies, even lies about reflecting pools. Sometimes it feels like we are drowning in them. We would never tolerate this from the people we love. Why do we tolerate it in our politics?

It’s like a new Dark Age, with the American empire crumbling beneath the weight of Trump’s lies, gaudy gilt, rampant corruption, and destruction of science. It feels like a war on the Enlightenment itself–the search for truth, the scientific method, the rejection of the supposed divine rights of kings.

We have got to repel this 21st century version of the barbarians at the gates. We simply cannot accept this new normal. We must not give up. We have to deepen our solidarity and re-affirm our values: which at the bare minimum include don’t lie, don’t covet, and don’t kill, and which certainly means act justly.

I don’t know what motivates Todd Blanche or any of the others who bend in proximity to power. I do know the wreckage that results when people are willing to do almost anything to get or keep it–and when billionaires can never have enough of it.

I’m reminded of the story about Joseph Heller, the author who was asked how he felt about some billionaire who had more money than he could ever make. He responded, “I have something he will never have: enough!”

Share

What I’m Reading or Rereading:

• Joseph Heller’s Catch-22

  • It’s still a brilliant satire–what will be the Catch-22 that captures this time?

• Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American

  • She’s a brilliant and a real life hero.

• FDR’s Four Freedoms speech

  • We need to boldly envision what redefining freedom means for us in the 21st century.

  ---

Supercharge your program with Action Network Boost

Powerful features for the most advanced digital programs, including deliverability reporting, priority support, a new way to dig deeper into your data, simplified email customization, and much, much more. Sign up and get 10% off Boost here >

Supercharge your program with Action Network Boost

Powerful features for the most advanced digital programs, including deliverability reporting, priority support, a new way to dig deeper into your data, simplified email customization, and much, much more. Sign up and get 10% off Boost here >

Todd Blanche Has Mutated DOJ into Trump’s Criminal Defense Firm, Destroying Its Independence

Just last night, Todd Blanche stood by his claim to Steve Bannon that the Department of Justice (DOJ) is not independent of the president. That is certainly true under Todd Blanche, but it was not true under the attorneys general who came before him.

He reiterated that position in his written answers to Questions for the Record submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee, where his nomination for Attorney General is pending. During last week’s hearing, Blanche said of Trump, “I’m his lawyer,” before quickly trying to walk it back to “was.” But it’s plain that he is still acting like Trump’s lawyer–not America’s top law enforcement official charged with enforcing the law on behalf of all Americans.

No Senate devoted to equal justice would confirm him as AG, but Trump loyalists already confirmed him as Deputy AG last March in a strictly partisan 52-46 vote. Democrats raised serious concerns that Blanche would fail to protect DOJ’s traditional independence from presidential interference in prosecutorial decisions. Blanche responded that Trump would never ask him “to do anything illegal or immoral…”

Those words are far less assuring than they first appear. Over the past 16 months, Blanche has aggressively protected Trump by shielding him from the mandated release of the fuller Epstein files, which mention Trump numerous times; pursuing prosecutions of his purported political enemies; using DOJ to secure an unprecedented and outlandish immunity deal for Trump and his family and companies; and otherwise contorting the nation’s top law enforcement agency into Trump’s law firm.

Subscribe now

Despite Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley’s reading of prepared remarks insisting that DOJ is doing fine–because other career lawyers continue to do their job to enforce the law where they can–the reality is that Blanche has decimated the department. That appears to be exactly the job Trump hired him to do. It starts with the Reagan maxim that “personnel is policy.”

The Justice Department has never had a top official who worked as the president’s criminal defense attorney. Never.

Then again, we’ve never had a convicted criminal as president until now.

I don’t mean to suggest that Pam Bondi, with her taxpayer-funded burn books of insults to sling at Democrats, was merely a figurehead. But after Trump fired her, she made clear that Blanche–not she– had been at the helm of the Epstein files and much more. Even though Bondi served on Trump’s first impeachment defense team, she was no Todd Blanche, who defended Trump in three separate criminal cases, spending more than 6,000 hours keeping him “out of jail for years.” Though Bondi held the title, Blanche was–and is–the power behind the throne, the real insider working the machine.

I know more than most about the Justice Department. I was a Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Policy/Policy Development in two administrations, under both Janet Reno and John Ashcroft, whose offices were just up the stairs on the fifth floor. My office was on the fourth floor overlooking the National Archives, where the Constitution is safeguarded, and I sat just down the hall from the Deputy Attorney General (DAG) when Eric Holder and later Robert Mueller held the job. I was a part of several working groups led by Associate DAGs in both administrations. What most people don’t realize is how small–and how powerful–the DAG’s office is.

Within DOJ’s leadership structure, the Criminal Division, the Executive Office for the U.S. Attorneys, and several other components all report to the DAG. And with Donald Trump’s support, Blanche recreated part of his criminal defense team inside that office:

• Emil Bove co-founded Blanche Law PLLC to represent Trump in his New York criminal fraud/false documents and hush money trial. He was also a partner at Chiesa Shahinian & Giantomasi (CSG). He served as Acting DAG and then Associate Deputy Attorney General before Trump named him to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit despite his controversial tenure at DOJ.

• Stephen Weiss served as counsel at Blanche Law PLLC after working with Blanche in the white collar criminal defense practice at Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft. He’s now an Associate DAG.

• Kendra Wharton was Of Counsel at Blanche Law PLLC. She later became an Associate DAG before returning to private practice, where she is now litigating in the Eleventh Circuit to try to keep Jack Smith’s Special Counsel report on the classified documents case secret, in defense of the order issued by Trump appointee Aileen Cannon.

Though they were not part of Trump’s criminal defense team, Blanche also hired, among others:

• Chris DeLorenz was brought on as Counsel after he finished clerking for Cannon during the proceedings following Trump’s indictment. Admitted to the bar less than four years ago, DeLorenz has already been detailed to Florida to help with what’s being called the “grand conspiracy” grand jury looking into former CIA Director John Brennan and others, as part of Trump’s revenge agenda.

• Jordan Fox, who worked with Bove at CSG, is now Associate DAG and Blanche’s Chief of Staff. Trump has floated naming her a U.S. Attorney in New Jersey, even though she graduated from law school only in 2021.

• Cody Poplin previously clerked for John Sauer, who is now Solicitor General and who argued the Trump criminal immunity case Blanche helped orchestrate before the Supreme Court. Poplin worked as counsel to Blanche in the DAG’s office and now serves as chief of staff to the Assistant AG overseeing the Civil Division.

For his small team as DAG, Blanche also hired lawyers who had worked closely with Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, Sen. Chuck Grassley (during the Kavanaugh nomination), and others—including Rep. Jordan’s son. One of Blanche’s law firm paralegals even landed a summer gig working in the National Security Division, which reports to him. He also hired a project manager whose recent experience consisted of two years doing digital work as an administrative assistant at FOX News.

Also on the books in the DAG’s office was Jared Wise, who urged fellow rioters on January 6 to “Kill ’em! Kill ’em! Kill ’em!” in reference to Capitol Police officers. Trump pardoned Wise while he was awaiting trial on felony charges as part of the blanket pardon for J6ers. News reports indicate that Ed Martin, Trump’s failed nominee for U.S. Attorney, hired Wise, but Blanche never fired him. Wise ultimately left after Blanche became Acting AG. Reports indicate Blanche had exiled Martin from the main Justice building, in part for not producing a “weaponization report” fast enough.

Blanche is far from the only Trump criminal defense attorney in DOJ leadership. Trump named one of Blanche’s co-counsels, Stanley Woodward, to be the Associate Attorney General, the third in command at DOJ. And John Sauer, who joined Blanche in arguing Trump’s January 6 appeal pushing for criminal immunity before the Supreme Court, now serves as the Solicitor General of the United States.

Another Trump criminal defense attorney, Harmeet Dhillon, now leads the Civil Rights Division as it pursues Trump’s demands for state voter registration records. Under Blanche, Trump also tried to install another of his criminal defense attorneys, Lindsey Halligan as the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. And, in addition to Bove, Trump has nominated two more of his criminal defense attorneys to the federal bench: Matthew Schwartz to the Second Circuit and Justin Smith to the Eighth Circuit.

To be fair, Blanche did not just hire former Trump criminal defense attorneys. He also fired every prosecutor who worked on any of the January 6 cases and every FBI agent, too, something he proudly touted at CPAC. Though he claimed during last week’s hearing that he was merely reciting those firings as a matter of fact, you can see for yourself that he gloried in them. Rather than avoiding potential conflicts of interest, Blanche has treated DOJ as though it were his own law firm, effectively declaring that anyone who once investigated his most important client is conflicted out of their job, regardless of their expertise and distinguished records of civil service.

None of this destruction of DOJ would be possible without three men: Blanche, Trump, and John Roberts.

Trump wants a DOJ under his fist to do his bidding in ways even Richard Nixon did not pursue. Blanche sees no conflict in weaponizing DOJ under the manufactured claim that other prosecutors and FBI agents supposedly abused their authority simply by prosecuting Trump (and his Jan-6 thugs) for the serious crimes that there was ample evidence he committed– charges Blanche denied on his client’s behalf.

Then there is John Roberts, who has normalized the radical and extreme notion that because executive power “vests” in the president, he can control DOJ from top to bottom and remove any executive branch official–or employee–who stands in his way. Blanche has reduced that theory to a simple proposition: because cabinet members serve at the pleasure of the president, they must do whatever the president says.

But that is not true. He could say no, like Bill Barr sometimes did. More importantly, Blanche’s incantation ignores the decades of norms established across party lines to protect prosecutorial power from being weaponized against political opponents (such as pursuing James Comey for posting a photo of seashells forming the phrase “86 47,” invoking the shorthand used in restaurants to cancel a menu item).

Roberts and his fellow Republican appointees have thrown the weight of the Supreme Court behind the invented “unitary executive theory” that is the throughline behind Blanche’s claim that he cannot act independently of his boss. This is a disaster for the rule of law itself, and it poses grave threats to fair elections.

When Blanche became Acting AG, he was asked whether he had any concerns about Trump directing him to pursue politically-motivated prosecutions. He said he had none and that his only concern was whether he was doing enough for Trump. That answer, along with the $1.776 billion, the Epstein files fiasco and everything else, is why Blanche is so unworthy of serving as the nation’s top law enforcement officer.

No one who acts like Trump is the law or sets the law–“L’État, c’est moi,” as King Louis the XIV supposedly declared before the French Revolution–should be entrusted with the enormous powers of the Attorney General of the United States.

Share

What I’m Reading:

• The Judiciary Act of 1789, which created the federal court system and the position of Attorney General.

  • That law states: “And there shall also be appointed a meet person, learned in the law, to act as attorney-general for the United States, who shall be sworn or affirmed to a faithful execution of his office; whose duty it shall be to prosecute and conduct all suits in the Supreme Court in which the United States shall be concerned, and to give his advice and opinion upon questions of law when required by the President of the United States, or when requested by the heads of any of the departments, touching any matters that may concern their departments, and shall receive such compensation for his services as shall by law be provided.”

• The Justice Manual, which is supposed to govern the prosecution decisions of federal attorneys.

  • It provides an array of standards including this admonition: “federal prosecutors and agents may never make a decision regarding an investigation or prosecution, or select the timing of investigative steps or criminal charges, for the purpose of affecting any election, or for the purpose of giving an advantage or disadvantage to any candidate or political party.”

• And, the U.S. Constitution, which declares that it is a president’s duty to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,” which is also part of the mandatory oath of office, which Roberts administered to Trump on January 20, 2026.

  ---

Supercharge your program with Action Network Boost

Powerful features for the most advanced digital programs, including deliverability reporting, priority support, a new way to dig deeper into your data, simplified email customization, and much, much more. Sign up and get 10% off Boost here >

The Senate should not confirm Todd Blanche to be Attorney General.

He has abused his temporary position as Acting Attorney General by continuing to behave like Donald Trump’s personal attorney rather than the nation’s chief law enforcement officer. Any Senator with even a shred of integrity would reject him, yet reporting this week suggests that Blanche is on a “glide path” to confirmation despite all of the damage he has already done as both Acting AG and Deputy AG.

I have reviewed Blanche’s paperwork, and I think the disclosures raise a legitimate question: Was he compensated, at least in part, through his appointment to DOJ by Donald Trump?

Subscribe now

In his responses to the Senate’s Questions for the Record (QFR) on his nomination to be Deputy Attorney General in 2025, Blanche stated: “I estimate that I worked on average 70 hours per week on matters for President Trump from the time I started my representation until early January, 2025.”

So from April 2023 until just before Trump’s inauguration, Blanche devoted almost 6,600 hours to him, almost every working hour and nearly every waking hour. That’s a level of devotion to a job that most Americans never experience. A typical full-time employee works about 2,080 hours per year.

Since the January 2025 inauguration, Blanche has spent another 77 weeks serving Trump, at our expense.

But how much did Trump, who is notorious for not paying his bills in full or in part, actually pay him? We don’t know.

Here’s what Blanche told the Senate under oath last year: “While I never had an exact standard billing rate, President Trump paid me an hourly rate that was appropriate for the work that I was performing.”

That’s a dodge and sounds pretty dodgy, too.

In March 2023, Blanche left a Big Law firm then known as Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft–where he had been an equity partner since September 2017–“primarily to represent Trump.” The estimated billing rate for a Big Law partner in 2023 was between $1,000 and $2,000 an hour. 6,600 hours at the rate of $2,000/hr would put Blanche’s fees north of $13 million. Even if he were billing Trump at the low end of that range, a discounted $1,000/hr, his fees would have totaled more than $6.6 million, assuming they were paid.

Did Trump actually pay anything close to that in fees for Blanche’s time? The available evidence suggests otherwise.

Well, for starters, we know Blanche bought a $1.6 million home in Palm Beach to be closer to Trump, and he took out a 30-year mortgage at an 8% rate to buy it. That sure doesn’t sound like someone rolling in the dough from his wealthy client or he could have paid cash, especially after his six years at Cadwalader.

His financial disclosure reported only $96,972 in salary from Blanche Law PLLC (a first-year associate at Cadwalader makes $235K per year). To be fair, he estimated a 2024 partnership draw from Blanche Law of about $2.2 million, but that was his own estimate. In his QFRs, he says his law firm was paid over $10 million by the Save America PAC, but those payments included expenses and the consultants his firm retained to defend Trump; they were not simply legal fees flowing to Blanche himself. Meanwhile, in 2025 he valued the firm at between $1 million and $5 million (and yet in his July 2026 financial disclosure he received a final partnership draw of $490,000 plus $18,324 in salary in 2025, so it seems the value was a lot less than he estimated).

If his estimate of a $2.2 million partnership draw were true, that would suggest that Blanche was billing Trump at the equivalent of roughly $600 an hour–well below what Cadwalader billed out for a senior counsel with far less experience.

Is that a huge discount or what?

In my opinion, part of Blanche’s compensation was a powerful appointment at the top of the Justice Department, where he could continue advancing Trump’s personal interests.

For example, he could collude with Trump in putting his signature on a completely outrageous and unprecedented “settlement” of Trump’s outlandish $10 billion demand over an IRS contractor’s data breach during his first term. As U.S. District Court Judge Kathleen Williams noted in her findings this week: Trump and DOJ perpetrated a fraud on the court. Blanche filed no motions to defend the U.S. from Trump’s suit, despite DOJ having done so in other comparable suits over that data breach. She also referred Blanche to the New York Bar for his actions.

What would Todd Blanche do (#WWTBD) for his former (and current) client? Almost anything, it seems. Here’s a key part of how Blanche used DOJ to try to immunize Trump in the collusive settlement of his IRS lawsuit:

The United States RELEASES, WAIVES, ACQUITS, and FOREVER DISCHARGES … and is hereby FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED from prosecuting or pursuing, any and all claims, counterclaims, causes of action, appeals. or requests for any relief, including injunctive relief, monetary relief, damages, examinations or similar or related reviews, appeals, debt relief, costs, attorney’s fees, expenses, and/or interest, whether presently known or unknown, that …have been or could have been asserted by Defendants [the U.S.] against any of the Plaintiffs [Trump] or related or affiliated individuals (including, without limitation, family or others filing jointly), or parties including trusts, parent, sister, or related companies, affiliates, and subsidiaries … in connection with … any matters currently pending or that could be pending … before Defendants or other agencies or departments.

What Blanche sought to give Trump is federal immunity–FOREVER–for his “unofficial acts,” meaning his private conduct (for any claims that have been or could have been asserted against Trump, his family, or his companies). It is the perfect and despicable companion to Chief Justice John Roberts and his fellow Republican appointees giving Trump immunity from criminal prosecution for his so-called “official acts.”

So, Blanche got rewarded for his service to Trump with a powerful role—at the very least like a bonus—and then used that office to reward Trump in return.

I don’t think you need an express quid pro quo to condemn this disgusting symbiosis.

The whole episode is utterly disqualifying in and of itself. It is so blatantly wrong. And, it is only part of the story.

In his QFR to the Senate last year, Blanche wrote that he “also served as counsel to President Trump in an advising capacity in various other civil investigations and cases between April 2023” and the 2025 inauguration. Ethics rules prevent him from revealing those cases or potential cases–or how much he was paid–without his client’s consent. Trump could make it public, with the snap of his fingers.

Don’t the American people deserve to know? Afterall, it was just days after Trump’s inauguration that he sued the IRS. Are we really expected to believe that potential lawsuit or compensating J-6ers never came up in all those 6,000+ hours of legal advice? Come on.

Of course, under John Roberts’ pernicious immunity opinion, Trump is unbound on who he can pardon–although I fully dispute that and am going to work to undo that assertion. With Blanche’s help and support for J-6ers, Trump has already pardoned his violent emissaries convicted of assaulting police officers to try to stop the certification of the 2020 presidential election. Just this month, Blanche oversaw the dismissal of charges of seditious conspiracy against Proud Boys members, in addition to orchestrating the effort to use DOJ’s settlement fund as a $1.776 billion vehicle to enrich Trump’s thugs. Congress has yet to bar those efforts and Blanche has refused to file any declarations committing to no such payouts.

Notably, Trump recently “joked” that he would pardon anyone who came within 200 feet of the Oval Office. Blanche now sits squarely inside that inner circle.

Blanche surely knows that Richard Nixon’s Attorney General, John Mitchell, was convicted of perjury and other crimes before being disbarred. Though it is revolting, it is also unsurprising that–with Blanche at the helm–DOJ is trying to block state bars from disbarring or punishing DOJ attorneys who break the rules. I wonder why?

Blanche must not be confirmed.

Any Senator who votes for him should be held accountable this fall and beyond, and that includes Susan Collins (R-ME), Jon Husted (R-OH), Dan Sullivan (R-AK), Thom Tillis (R-NC), John Cornyn (R-TX), and Bill Cassidy (R-LA). Those who Trump sought to punish for being insufficiently loyal to him should make like John McCain and give Blanche a thumbs down, if they have any devotion to the rule of law left.

Share

What I’m Reading:

• The lawsuit from Blanche’s former clients claiming he overbilled them (Trump expressed no such concerns):

  • They also claim he forged documents, which he denies, right before he parachuted out of Cadwalader to “primarily defend” Trump.

• The letter from the Justice Connection that I signed along with more than 1,000 other former DOJ officials and attorneys opposing Blanche’s confirmation.

  • Our letter notes that “Regardless of how we joined the department, every one of us took an oath to support and defend the Constitution, not the occupant of the White House. That oath now compels us to speak out against the nomination of Todd Blanche for Attorney General–someone who took the same oath, but has utterly failed to abide by it.“

• The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate by James Rosen.

  • Before Trump became the first felon and adjudicated sexual abuser ever elected president, Nixon’s Attorney General was the highest ranking executive branch official ever convicted of criminal charges–and disbarred.

The Roberts Court continues to issue cruel orders that ignore facts and bend the law to aid Donald Trump. Time and again, the Republican-appointed faction dominating the Court has declared that ordinary people are not even allowed to bring their claims to the Court.

This time, Sam Alito deployed judicial power to assert that U.S. residents who fled natural disasters and political collapse in Haiti cannot sue to prevent the Trump administration from terminating their residency. This ruling clears the way for Trump and his callous lieutenants to force these men, women, and children to return to a country in the midst of an undeniable humanitarian catastrophe.

Subscribe now

The U.S. State Department classifies Haiti at Level 4, its highest travel warning with the highest probability of life-threatening risks. In bright red, it warns: “Do Not Travel” and notes that all non-essential U.S. personnel have been ordered to leave Haiti, citing rampant violent crime, gang violence, kidnappings, rape, and killings. Haiti has been under a declaration of emergency for more than two years, and its law enforcement apparatus has been largely unable to protect the safety of residents. The situation on the ground is so unstable that U.S. airlines do not even fly there anymore.

Yet, shortly after being sworn in by Clarence Thomas as Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem began the process of vacating a previous extension of “Temporary Protected Status” (TPS) for 330,735 Haitians living in the United States. They were granted TPS by the U.S. government after the massive earthquake that rocked the island nation in 2010 and the political collapse of governance that followed. Haiti now has no sitting president or parliament, its key courts lack judges, and violent, rival gangs control much of the country. Doctors, lawyers, and others with any significant wealth are often kidnapped for ransom.

Donald Trump has repeatedly expressed racial animus toward Haitians in the U.S. and toward Haiti itself, calling it a “shithole,” as Justice Elena Kagan noted in her dissent, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump falsely–and poisonously–claimed that Haitian residents in Ohio were eating their neighbors’ pets, a malicious lie that was widely rebuked. Then-Vice Presidential candidate, native Ohioan J.D. Vance, amplified the grotesque claim before later acknowledging it was false while arguing it was necessary to “create stories” to force the media into covering immigration.

This episode was and remains reprehensible, an utterly evil and vile act in my opinion.

But Sam Alito, along with his fellow Republican appointees, brushed aside that history. He wrote that none of Trump’s or his allies’ statements “was overtly racial” and asserted that the decision to end TPS for Haitians “could rest on” reasons having nothing to do with race, such as hostility to the notion of providing refuge.

So, according to the Roberts Court, key government officials can make policy changes aligned with obviously racist statements so long as they do not utter the n-word and can point to some “non-racist” alternative justification for their official actions.

This sounds a lot like the approach Alito choreographed for the legislatures of the former Confederacy to diminish Black political representation by claiming their motives were partisan, not racist, even when the effects have been definitively racist, with statistical precision. The Roberts Court’s active destruction of the Voting Rights Act is despicable beyond words.

The fact that the Trump regime also revoked TPS for 3,860 Syrians does not somehow make its targeting of the Haitian community non-racist. Syria, too, remains under a Level 4 threat advisory from the State Department, though the administration has lifted sanctions on the country as it squeezes its leader to aid Trump in the Middle East.

At the same time, Trump has turned America’s refugee program, designed for people fleeing disaster or persecution, into a vehicle to roll out the red carpet for white Afrikaners who claim to be victims of discrimination in post-Apartheid South Africa.

Trump’s policies can be cruel and racist and also just cruel, arbitrary, and capricious. But the Roberts Court has now declared that immigrant residents–no matter how long they have been in the U.S. or how deeply rooted they are in their local communities–do not have standing to sue the administration to challenge the revocation of TPS. As Justice Kagan noted, the Court is cutting off their ability to ask impartial lower court judges to hear their claims of racial bias and evaluate whether the Trump administration’s actions violate the Constitution’s Equal Protection clause.

Ending TPS protections for these law-abiding members of our communities will most certainly result in death and profound suffering. And for what reason? Why must Trump act with such cruelty toward people who have fled disasters and sought refuge here? And why must the Roberts Court act with such eagerness to aid him?

These are shameful and destructive actions by a Court majority that owes half its members to a president who demands their fealty, and who increasingly–though not always–gets it in ways that wreak havoc on our people, our neighbors, and our world.

Like everything Trump touches, he is making the humanitarian crisis in Haiti infinitely worse. But he is not acting alone. This is the terrible world that Leonard Leo and his billionaire backers have imposed on America through the captured Roberts Court. This disaster is just one more example of the damage they have inflicted and yet another reminder of why we urgently need a robust Congress and a president committed to repairing such damage and preventing it from happening again.

Share

What I’m Reading:

• “The Crisis I Witnessed in Haiti”

  • This is a compelling firsthand account from Tirana Hassan, the CEO of Doctors Without Borders USA.

• The Congressional Research Service report on TPS

  • Generally, the CRS reports provide factually reliable and neutral recitations of the legislative history of various policy matters.

• The U.S. Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause, which applies to persons, and not only to citizens, by its express terms.

This month, the Roberts Court is expected to issue a ruling to officially destroy the independence of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and overturn nearly a century of legal precedent. This is a choice–an illegitimate one–not a necessity or requirement of the law, no matter what John Roberts and his fellow Republican appointees on the Supreme Court may claim in Trump v. Slaughter. Their edict will be dressed up in the language of “separation of powers,” but that is merely a costume for this extraordinary power grab.

The Roberts Court has already allowed Donald Trump to destroy the independence of the FTC as a practical matter. Last March, Trump illegally fired Rebecca Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya, the two Democratic appointees to the agency who had been confirmed by the Senate. This action was not just theoretically illegal: it violated the plain language of the statute governing the FTC, created in 1914. It also violated a long-standing Supreme Court precedent affirming the constitutionality of that statute–a 1931 case called Humphrey’s Executor–which rejected FDR’s efforts to fire an FTC commissioner, appointed by his predecessor, Herbert Hoover, without cause or any misconduct.

Subscribe now

The lower federal courts responded appropriately when Slaughter sued, reinstating her. It did so while continuing the litigation to consider Trump’s claim that under the “unitary executive theory” all executive power “vests” in him and so he can fire anyone in the executive branch at any time for any reason or no reason at all.

Despite the clear illegality of Trump’s action, the Roberts Court intervened through its “shadow docket,” without oral argument, and overturned the temporary restraining order that had preserved the status quo–namely that Slaughter was a duly appointed commissioner who could not be fired without cause–while Trump’s assertion of unilateral power was litigated. Instead, in one of dozens of such shadowy edicts, the Roberts Court allowed Trump to effectively win before the case had been decided, turning the standard temporary restraining order process on its head and keeping Slaughter off of the FTC.

That’s because one of the things the Roberts Court is doing is pre-reversing the law to aid Trump and its own illegitimate agenda until it can get around to making it official.

By statute, the FTC is supposed to have five commissioners, three from one party and two from the other, with the president naming the chair. But that was not enough power for Trump. He wanted Democratic appointees kept out of the room where it happens, excluded from decisionmaking–even in dissent–on mergers that might reduce competition or violate antitrust laws. Such mergers could benefit Trump’s backers or serve his transactional politics, while harming consumers by driving prices higher.

Since Slaughter’s firing, the FTC has terminated more than three dozen merger enforcement investigations. That includes examinations involving companies run by major Trump donors, such as Google. Last fall, the FTC terminated its examination of Google’s planned $32 billion acquisition of Wiz, a cloud/AI start-up, the company’s largest acquisition ever. Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Alphabet, Google’s holding company, stood behind Trump at his inauguration last year, and Google/Alphabet gave $1 million to Trump’s inauguration committee. Google is also one of the companies underwriting Trump’s $400 million ballroom pay-to-play boondoggle. Would that merger have gone through if President Joe Biden’s appointee, Lina Khan–a vocal critic of Google’s and Amazon’s mega market power–were still chairing the FTC (if Kamala Harris had won)? We will never know. To be fair, the FTC is appealing its case against Meta–perhaps Mark Zuckerberg has not ponied up enough for Trump.

Since last spring, the FTC has had only two commissioners, both Republicans. Trump named Andrew Ferguson, a former Mitch McConnell aide and Clarence Thomas clerk, to replace Khan as chair. He also secured Senate confirmation for Mark Meador after firing the remaining Democrats. Meador previously staffed Trump ally Sen. Mike Lee before joining the Heritage Foundation, the group behind the 900+ page “Mandate for Leadership” (better known as “Project 2025”)–the destructive blueprint Trump has been implementing, despite his deceptive claims during the campaign that he had nothing to do with it.

Project 2025 devotes an entire chapter to limiting the power of the FTC, even questioning if the agency should continue enforcing antitrust laws that preserve competition, a core mission of the agency to help protect consumers from price gouging and abuse by monopolies. The blueprint expressly urged the next president (Trump) to violate Humphrey’s Executor and tee up a case for the Roberts Court to overturn that legal precedent. It also attacks the FTC’s statutory bar on a president removing commissioners without cause, arguing it supposedly violates the “vesting” clause of the Constitution.

This may seem arcane, but it is all about power and it’s important to understand how we got here. That vesting clause argument traces back to Robert Bork, who argued in 1974 that Congress could not create an independent counsel to investigate presidential crimes–and be protected from firing–because doing so would violate the executive powers vested in the president under Article II. It was Bork who, in the infamous Saturday Night Massacre, fired Archibald Cox, the federal prosecutor investigating the Watergate crimes, after the Attorney General and his Deputy resigned rather than carry out Richard Nixon’s orders. The Reagan administration embraced Bork by naming him to the D.C. Circuit and then trying to install him on the Supreme Court.

The Reagan administration also took up Bork’s mantle in asserting that Congress could not constrain presidents with independent counsels or agencies, as then-Attorney General Ed Meese asserted in a radical speech to the American Bar Association in 1985.

Legal scholar Deborah Perlstein has compellingly described their conception of the so-called “unitary executive theory” thus:

So singular was the President’s power, the theory went, that it called into constitutional question the authority of Congress or the courts to regulate Executive Branch personnel or processes in any way that interfered with the President’s ability to make policy, appoint or fire Executive Branch officials, or even interpret the scope of his own constitutional power.

That’s precisely where we are today, with Trump in power and Roberts at the helm of the highest court in the land. This theory has animated the subservience of the Justice Department under Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, and meanwhile the Roberts Court is turning it from a theory into a mandate in destructive ways that will outlive Trump.

As Leonard Leo—who orchestrated the packing of the Supreme Court with backing from right-wing billionaires—extolled after Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation secured a majority of five former and devoted Republican administration officials on the high court:

I think we stand at the threshold of an exciting moment in our republic. The revival of our structural constitution by the US Supreme Court ... And this is really, I think in recent memory, a newfound embrace of limited constitutional government in our country. I don’t think this has really happened since probably before the New Deal, which means no one in this room has probably experienced the kind of transformation that I think we are beginning to see.

That is the transformation–or rather, the regression–we are witnessing.

Roberts got partway there in his opinion in Seila Law v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in 2020, and he didn’t need Amy Coney Barrett to do it. In that case, he began the destruction of independent and quasi-independent agencies by declaring that Trump could remove the head of the CFPB at will, despite Congress requiring cause for removal when it created the Bureau after Wall Street crashed during the George W. Bush administration.

And who runs the CFPB right now? It’s no longer independent: the unconfirmed acting head is Russell Vought, another Project 2025 operative who has been wreaking havoc on the federal agencies that protect our interests, after aiding Elon Musk’s dodgy firings as the head of the White House Office of Management and Budget.

Notably, in Seila Law, Roberts distinguished the CFPB from the FTC, arguing that the latter was structured to be quasi-legislative. Now here we are, five short years later, with Roberts ready and eager to kill the FTC’s independence and flagrantly ignore his own recent reasoning.

This is part of Roberts’ playbook on abortion and other issues where even the Court’s own recent precedent or assurances really aren’t worth the paper they are written on. Just look at his methodical dismantling of the Voting Rights Act in phases, starting with Shelby and continuing through Callais, where he eviscerates one protection while insisting others remain–only to return later and dismantle those as well.

This time, Roberts is poised to ratify another gift of unprecedented power to Trump by saying that firing FTC commissioners is no longer illegal, even if he stops short of allowing Trump to fire Federal Reserve governors. That, too, would fit Roberts’ track record of siding with Wall Street when it is in (rare) conflict with Trump or the Republican Party, not for the sake of consumers–as the tariff ruling earlier this year demonstrated–but to preserve a different set of elite interests.

What’s clear is that the Roberts Court continues to wield power not like a fair and impartial court, but like a group of chieftains in a war to remake our legal landscape. These arrogant operatives in black robes are not checking their biases at the courthouse door; they have moved their prejudices and partisanship in like luggage and a wardrobe. We are going to have to reform this Court to restore real checks and balances, including a president faithfully executing our laws rather than being given legal license to bend and break them.

Share

What I’m Reading:

• Deborah Perlstein’s “The Democracy Effects of Legal Polarization: Movement Lawyering at the Dawn of the Unitary Executive”

  • She details the machinations inside the Reagan administration that spawned the “unitary executive theory” and some of the effects we are living through today.

• Paul Blumenthal’s “The Supreme Court Is Illegitimate,” which dismantles the Roberts Court’s partisan intervention in the 2026 midterms and its destruction of the landmark Voting Rights Act.

• And, Article II of the U.S. Constitution, which has no mention of the so-called unitary executive theory and instead commands the president to faithfully execute the laws passed by Congress.

This week, the Roberts Court engineered another potential victory for Donald Trump by erasing a Black-majority congressional district–led by Rep. Shomari Figures of Mobile, AL–a district the Court itself had previously approved. Before ruling in 2023 that Alabama’s illegal maps could not be used because they violated the Voting Rights Act, it had allowed those maps to remain in place for the 2022 midterms because, as of February, it was supposedly “too close” to the election to change them.

Now, that same Court has decreed that Alabama’s maps–that other courts found to be in violation of voting rights–can be deployed, quite literally, in the middle of an ongoing election.

What changed?

The personnel on the Supreme Court did not change, but the party in the White House did. In 2022, the Court’s permission to use the illegal maps helped Republicans take control of Congress and obstruct Democratic president Joe Biden’s legislative agenda. Now, in 2026, the Roberts Court is acting to help Republicans keep control of Congress. The naked partisanship is appalling.

The constitutionally-mandated 2020 census showed that the white population in Alabama shrunk to two-thirds of the state’s residents. In spite of that, the legislature drew six white-majority congressional districts out of seven. The lower courts reviewed the evidence in 2021 and found that those maps diluted the Black vote and discriminated against Black Alabamanians, so they ordered the creation of a second Black-majority district, which was affirmed by the Supreme Court in 2023 in Alabama v. Milligan.

The governor and majority-white legislature at first refused to follow that order. Some Republicans connected to Supreme Court-packer Leonard Leo said out loud that they had “intelligence” that the Roberts Court was soon going to issue rulings in other cases that would save the 2021 map that limited Black representation. Once that defiant conspiracy was outed, the state of Alabama begrudgingly created a second Black-majority district stretching from Montgomery to Mobile.

Then came the Callais ruling this April.

John Roberts handed Sam Alito the pen to gut the Voting Rights Act, while claiming the law still barred intentional discrimination against Black voters. Then the white-dominated Alabama legislature rushed to erase the new, fair maps and raced to ask the Roberts Court to block them. Roberts’s “Neo-Confederate Court,” of course, granted their wish.

While Trump acts like an obnoxious spoiled brat wanting to change the rules in the middle of the game so he can cheat to win, he’s just the front man. He’s the seedy carnival barker for the main act that is happening in the circus tent: an imperious Supreme Court hell-bent on regressing our democracy.

Roberts has had it out for the Voting Rights Act since he was a young man, and he is illegitimately using judicial power to win battles he once lost as a lawyer. In the Shelby case, he x’d out Congress’ detailed factual findings that supported pre-clearance of any changes to voting rules in states with a history of trying to thwart Black representation, like Alabama.

This week’s ruling follows the same pattern.

With the stroke of a pen, the anonymous unsigned Roberts Court opinion faulted the lower courts for failing to give Alabama a “presumption of legislative good faith.” That’s a new approach to the VRA that Sam Alito bear-hugged in Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP when the Roberts Court upheld a congressional map that removed more than 20,000 Black voters from their longstanding district to pack them into one Black-majority district, despite lower court findings that this was a racial gerrymander.

With Roberts’s backing, Alito argued that this racial dilution executed with surgical precision could be excused as merely “partisan” and therefore A-OK, even though it was also quite clearly racial and intentionally so. In doing so, they simultaneously maintained an assertion that racial gerrymandering–redefined and narrowed–is still illegal.

But it’s not. Not as a practical matter, because the Roberts Six have distorted the law to declare that racially disparate effects cannot be counted in finding discrimination.

Then there is the audacity–the immorality, really–of insisting that Alabama is entitled, despite all that has happened, to a “presumption” of good faith. Alabama has demonstrably acted in bad faith and has a very long history of doing so.

However, this nightmare is on brand with what the Roberts Court is all about: fiction.

It is now routinely pretending to act in good faith when it is not, just like when John Roberts claimed that it is wrong to call this (very political) court political. What happened this week is just more grotesque legal fiction being manufactured by Roberts & Co. to advance an extreme political agenda.

It is also another example of how Roberts and Alito have been wielding judicial power to red-pencil our civil rights laws to match their own personal biases.

I’ve documented Roberts’ long-standing hostility to the Voting Rights Act, but what about Alito?

What would propel him to pollute the Voting Rights Act with the irrational notion that the federal courts must “presume good faith” by a state legislature?

The idea is antithetical to the statute itself. The VRA was enacted because the people showed and Congress found that states such as Alabama repeatedly acted in bad faith–for generations–to suppress Black political power and representation. If anything, the VRA and its proponents have a right to presume the opposite of Alito’s fiction: that Alabama’s white legislature would act in bad faith at any opportunity. And it has.

What, then, explains Alito’s view?

Some clues can be found in his own history.

Alito was born on April Fool’s Day in 1950 in Trenton, New Jersey. Back then, the city had over 120,000 residents with a growing number of Black Americans, about 11%, a percentage that would double by 1960. As industrial migration and the civil rights movement started gaining steam, Sam Alito’s parents moved to suburban Hamilton Township, where he attended public schools that were almost entirely white. At Hamilton-East Steinert High School, he helmed the all-white student council as student body president in 1968.

Years later, during the Reagan administration, while seeking a plum role in the Office of Legal Counsel, Alito wrote an essay extolling his deep loyalty to the Republican Party and to advancing Reagan’s right-wing ideological agenda. During the interview process, he identified Bill Rehnquist as the Supreme Court justice he most admired. Rehnquist was John Roberts’ mentor and the most anti-voting-rights justice on the Court at that time.

In that same essay, Alito also specifically highlighted his hostility to the abortion ruling of the Burger Court and to the “apportionment” rulings of the Warren Court.

Though they do not come up often these days, the apportionment cases were vital to early efforts to dismantle systems of political inequality that helped keep Southern legislatures segregated. In cases like Reynolds v. Sims, the Warren Court found that Alabama was violating the Constitution by not apportioning legislative districts to have roughly equal populations, limiting Black representation.

The Warren Court’s findings in such cases were premised on the Constitution’s command that “representation in the legislature shall be based upon population,” and the American principles President Abraham Lincoln beautifully exalted: “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” The apportionment cases extol and protect the importance of “one person, one vote.” Accordingly, the Warren Court required states to redraw maps that invidiously discriminated by systematically diluting Black representation and entrenching white rule.

One justice, John Marshall Harlan II, dissented and would have let the states continue to use such racially biased maps. That is who Alito said he admired.

And that is who Alito still is. Just like Roberts, his regressive views are rigidly frozen in amber from decades ago.

Despite the promises Roberts and Alito made as judicial nominees–that they would faithfully follow precedent and act as humble judges who would not usurp Congress’s power–they do the opposite, repeatedly.

The Roberts Court is an aggressive and growing blight on America’s ability to function as a representative democracy, to secure liberty and justice for all.

It is not functioning like an independent tribunal devoted to fair interpretation, but more like the unaccountable arm of a political party. We must reform the Roberts Court and limit its power. Until we do so, it will continue to dismantle our rights.

Subscribe now

Share

What I’m (Re)Reading:

• Judgment Days: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Laws that Changed America by Nick Kotz

  • As one of my heroes, Jimmy Carter, observed in reading this book: it “brings new insights about enormous breakthroughs for the cause of equality and justice … at a time when it is imperative that we renew the fight for a more perfect union.”

• Medgar & Myrlie: Medgar Evers and the Love Story That Awakened America by Joy-Ann Reid

  • This details the struggle against violent white supremacists who sought to block Black Americans from voting and the racist fiends who assassinated Medgar Evans and other civil rights heroes.

• The 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, which were written to secure equal rights, including voting rights, in our democratic republic.

The Roberts Court’s edict in the Callais case is allowing the former Confederacy to re-segregate congressional delegations, a stunning turn of events designed to distort the midterm elections. Its rank partisanship advances Karl Rove’s fever dream of a “permanent Republican majority,” a profoundly illegitimate action by Roberts and his fellow Republican appointees in aid of Donald Trump and his MAGA extremism.

It has been 130 years since the Supreme Court last issued such a destructive edict in favor of racial segregation. That case, Plessy v. Ferguson, immorally ratified racial apartheid in America, despite the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments birthed from the blood and sacrifice of the Civil War. As President Abraham Lincoln said so eloquently in his Gettysburg Address in 1863, “Our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”

Subscribe now

Plessy broke the promises of the amendments that had led to the election of the first Black U.S. Senator, Hiram Revels, along with more than 2,000 federal, state, and local Black representatives during the 12 years of the Reconstruction–before white supremacists regained national and state power. That decision blessed the flourishing of Jim Crow as the law of the land–and with it an array of obstacles to Black representation–until the Voting Rights Act was finally passed in 1965.

Despite Plessy, there were some real breakthroughs along the way before then.

In 1939, for example, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter helped block a “grandfather clause” that made it harder for Black Americans to vote, noting that a facially neutral law could still violate those Amendments if its effect was to exclude Black voters. As he put it, and later Supreme Court justices recognized, the Constitution forbids both “sophisticated, as well as simple-minded, modes of discrimination.”

President Harry Truman worked with the NAACP to order the desegregation of the armed forces after so many Black soldiers fought and sacrificed to defend freedoms abroad that they themselves were denied at home by white supremacists.

In 1954, Chief Justice Earl Warren, the former Republican governor of California, penned and secured a unanimous ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, striking down racial segregation in public schools.

But those landmark victories were not enough to secure fundamental rights for Black Americans. Success required sustained mass action and extraordinary bravery.

Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., beautifully summarized that historic civil rights movement in his acceptance speech for the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize, lifting up “the thousands, faceless, anonymous, relentless young people, black and white,” and extolling:

“Their courageous and disciplined activities have come as a refreshing oasis in a desert sweltering with the heat of injustice. They have taken our whole nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in the formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.”

The following year, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, blocking Southern states from making a change in election rules unless they could prove it “neither has the purpose nor will have the effect of denying or abridging the right to vote on account of race or color.” As President Johnson emphasized when he signed the VRA into law: “The vote is the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice and destroying the terrible walls which imprison men because they are different from other men.”

But the backlash was swift. Just 15 years later, in Mobile v. Bolden, the man who would become John Roberts’ mentor, Bill Rehnquist, worked with other Republican appointees to assert that violations of Section 2 of the VRA could be proven only by intent, not effect. Justice Thurgood Marshall dissented, warning that this restriction would make the VRA protect “nothing more than the right to cast meaningless ballots.”

The year after that, fellow clerks would note how closely aligned Roberts was with Rehnquist’s hostility toward civil rights. Rehnquist then secured a job for Roberts working directly with Ronald Reagan’s Attorney General, where Roberts spearheaded efforts to block Congress from overturning Mobile. Roberts–who had zero experience with voting rights other than staging for a justice hostile to them–lost that battle, and in 1982 Reagan signed the amended VRA into law.

It took less than 45 years for John Crow–I mean John Roberts–to go from spending hundreds of hours trying (and failing) to stop Congress from protecting Black voters from vote dilution to him handing the pen to Sam Alito, his eager henchman, to drive a dagger through the heart of the VRA and its protections in Section 2 of the law.

A few moves earlier on the dreadful chessboard where Roberts is trying to rig elections to favor the white-dominated political party that put him on the bench, Roberts gutted the pre-clearance rules for the South to change voting rules and maps. Then the Roberts Court blocked federal courts from stopping partisan gerrymandering, under the pretense that the VRA only barred racial gerrymandering. Then, like some hack magician saying presto-chango before pulling a planted rabbit from a hat, Roberts waved his wand to allow racial gerrymandering that diluted the Black vote as long as the white legislature–wink, wink, nod, nod–calls it “partisan,” since the overwhelming majority of Black Americans vote Democratic.

More and more everyday Americans and leaders alike are calling for serious reform of the Supreme Court. Between the illegitimate Callais ruling, the way Roberts invented unprecedented criminal immunity for Trump, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and the ongoing ethical scandals that have engulfed this neo-Confederate Court, we are witnessing a massive sea change in public consciousness about the Supreme Court.

There is a growing understanding that to restore and expand our rights, we must rip out–at its roots–the anti-democratic notion of judicial supremacy. An unelected high court packed with ringers determined to rollback legal precedents protecting our liberties should not be allowed to have the final say to restrict our rights, like our voting rights.

As Abraham Lincoln warned in his first Inaugural Address: “If the policy of the Government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made in ordinary litigation between parties in personal actions the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their Government into the hands of that eminent tribunal.”

Until we strip the Roberts Court of the power to restrict our voting rights and to unleash the scourge of billionaire dark money in our elections, we will not be able to secure our freedoms–or our destiny as a thriving democracy grounded on liberty and justice for all.

Subscribe now

Share

What I’m (Re)Reading:

• The op-ed I wrote with David Daley about John Roberts growing up in a tony all-white enclave steps from the sandy shores of Lake Michigan.

• My book, Without Precedent, which details how Roberts got the job at the Justice Department working to blunt the Voting Rights Act and more.

• The Constitution’s 15th Amendment, which established the right to vote for Black men who had been freed from slavery and also granted Congress the power to protect that right.

For the past three weeks, I have been having nightmares about the ghouls of the racist confederacy within our nation that Chief Justice John Roberts has effectively resummoned in Louisiana v. Callais. In the same span, I have fielded near-daily calls about the waking nightmare the Roberts Court has unleashed by using that case to decimate the Voting Rights Act–the most important civil rights statute ever passed.

I confess I have found it difficult to write about the obvious evil consequences of that illegitimate ruling: enabling white-dominated legislatures in the South to bleach out Black representation under the pretext of “partisanship.”

Because it’s not okay. It’s deeply, terribly, and destructively immoral.

Subscribe now

It is also a glaring sign of just how out of control and unjudicial the Roberts Court has become, openly usurping powers the Constitution explicitly grants to Congress to protect voting rights. The arrogance of John Roberts’ anti-voting-rights agenda is staggering, though it has likely not even reached its peak.

In the weeks since Callais, this faction of partisan political operatives on the nation’s highest court has repeatedly put its thumb on the scales of justice–over and over and over again–to benefit the Republican Party in this pivotal midterm election year. The Roberts Court issued this ruling knowing exactly how eagerly Southern legislatures would take up its obscene invitation to redraw their maps to suppress Black representation.

John Roberts may as well have ordered “Whites Only” signs to be printed and hung up on the doors of state legislatures in the South, just like the drinking fountains of yore. As my friend, the brilliant Mike Podhorzer, has dubbed it, this is a “neo-Confederate Court.”

Just look at how eagerly the Roberts Court has aided the party–and the super rich, regressive billionaires–that appointed it, to the disadvantage of Black Americans and our representative democracy. In February 2022, when Joe Biden was president, the Roberts Court blocked a lower court order requiring Alabama to redraw its congressional map, which had packed Black voters into a single district while creating six white-majority districts, despite the white population falling to 62%. The Roberts Court disingenuously claimed that the lower court’s January ruling came too close to the election to allow the maps to be changed, invoking what is known as the Purcell doctrine.

By allowing the 2022 midterms to proceed with maps in violation of the VRA, the Roberts Court limited Black representation, helped Republicans take control of Congress, and thwarted Biden’s legislative agenda. Then, in 2023, the Court ruled that Alabama did, in fact, have to create a second Black-majority district. But by then, the damage was done–and the Court quickly pivoted to impugn Biden’s standing in other ways, deploying its freshly invented “major questions doctrine,” to block his modest student debt forgiveness. It’s a fictional legal standard we mysteriously almost never hear mentioned when it comes to Trump’s radical dictates over the past 16 months.

Now, in 2026, with Trump openly demanding that congressional maps be redrawn to shield him from the threat of a Democratic-led House, and thereby accountability for his actions, the Roberts Court has flipped its own script. It has decreed that Alabama doesn’t have to have that new Black-majority district and neither do Louisiana or Tennessee, even though we are months closer to the primary and general elections than back in 2022.

Not only that, the Roberts Court didn’t even mention Purcell, even though citizens in Louisiana, for example, were already actively voting in an election. Meanwhile, when Democrats in Virginia attempted to counter these machinations by Trump and his minions, the Roberts Court allowed more than three million votes to be canceled out by another Republican-dominated court in Virginia.

There can be no doubt anymore that John Roberts is not a fair umpire. He is bent by his bias, his profound hostility toward the Voting Rights Act as he revealed in the Shelby case in 2013.

With Callais, Roberts is shamelessly giving himself a win in a battle that he knows, with every muscle in his body, he lost as a special lawyer during the Reagan administration.

My friend Podhorzer asked me if I was going to write about the parallels between this scenario and Moby Dick. In Herman Melville’s great American novel, Captain Ahab is consumed by rage after the huge whale, Moby Dick, tears away one of his legs. Ahab’s obsessive pursuit of the whale that had once bested him ultimately succeeds, in a sense, though the end result is catastrophic loss. He harpoons Moby Dick, only to be dragged to his death by the rope, after which the whale smashes his ship, drowning the entire crew except for a lone survivor.

Roberts appears similarly unable to accept that he once lost his fight over Section 2 of the VRA and became obsessed with winning at any cost–even if the cost was losing the country itself. Catching the whale and crushing the voting rights of Black Americans may feel like a victory to Roberts today, but buried within this retrograde victory of faux color-blindness are the exact ingredients for an enormous loss for Roberts.

Americans across the South and beyond are furious. Voters see the debasement of our nation under an utterly corrupt and incompetent president–and a complicit Roberts Court–and they are rising up. People are clamoring for real change, demanding that our voices be heard.

The court of public opinion is already delivering its verdict. John Roberts, who infamously said that if the public doesn’t like a ruling, “it’s just too bad,” is about to find out what can happen when you finally catch the whale. More and more people have no confidence in the fairness of the Roberts Court, which is acting as though it stands above the law itself–dictating changes to our rights in defiance of the popular will and dismantling protections that thousands of our representatives voted for and millions of Americans struggled for decades to secure.

Despite Roberts’ gaslighting that the court is not partisan, more and more of the public see these rulings for exactly what they are: hyperpartisan, imperious, illegitimate, and deeply racist. Together, we are going to rebuke and disempower operatives in judicial robes who dare to act as unaccountable kings, including “John Crow” Roberts himself.

Subscribe now

Share

What I’m Reading:

• Reviews of “Supremacy: How Rule by the Court Replaced Government by the People,” the forthcoming book by Nikolas Bowie and Daphna Renan

• Elie Mystal: “Can’t Reform the Court’s Power? Then Let’s Take It Away.”

• Article III of the Constitution which gives the Supreme Court jurisdiction over a few narrow areas, like disputes between states, but gives Congress the ultimate power to determine exceptions to that rule: “In all the other Cases before mentioned, the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.”

Early voting is underway for Virginia’s April 21 special election, which could help Democrats secure four additional congressional seats. The effort comes in response to moves by Republicans in Texas, Missouri, North Carolina, and Ohio, to redraw maps and try to deliver Donald Trump up to nine more seats in the House, where Republicans currently hold a narrow edge: 217-214, plus one independent and three vacancies.

Last November, Californians voted to counter the Texas legislature’s actions to redraw congressional districts to benefit Trump, ultimately shielding him from investigations into his lawlessness and alleged abuses of power and corruption. The Roberts Court intervened in December to overturn a lower court ruling that the Texas maneuver–targeting five representatives, including Rep. Al Green (D-TX), a Black congressman elected ten times by Harris County, who has filed impeachment articles against Trump–violated the Voting Rights Act and legal precedents. That Roberts Court edict was issued, without full briefing or oral arguments, under the shadow docket (also called the emergency docket) without a full opinion justifying the reversal. Nonetheless, it signaled to other states that they could proceed with similar redistricting efforts.

Subscribe now

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) has steered the chamber away from any check on Trump’s power, with the exception of the few defections that forced a vote on the Jeffrey Epstein transparency law. That measure forced the administration to release files detailing the investigation into sex trafficking and sexual abuse orchestrated by Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. The files reveal the identities of numerous men who traveled on Epstein’s private jet, the “Lolita Express.” Trump’s name appears thousands of times, including in allegations by a woman that she was forced, as a child, to perform fellatio on him.

The stakes in Virginia are very high.

A U.S. House of Representatives under Democratic leadership could act as a robust check on Trump, including by investigating how then-Attorney General Pam Bondi and now-Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche (Trump’s former criminal defense attorney) botched the requirements of the transparency law by redacting the names of potential predators while exposing the names of numerous survivors. A Democrat-led Congress could also be a powerful counterweight to Trump’s demands that more money be diverted from services the American people need–like Medicare and Medicaid–to fuel his foreign wars and reckless tax cuts for billionaires.

There has been a flurry of ads attacking the measure in Virginia, including these misleading mailers that were shared with me by some friends.

So who exactly is behind all of this?

A billionaire.

But not just any billionaire. Peter Thiel, one of the richest men in America.

Thiel is profiting enormously both from Trump’s massive tax cuts and the administration’s huge contracts with companies he controls, including Palantir Technologies and related platforms. Those entities have received more than $13 billion in contracts with the Trump administration for systems involved in deploying artificial intelligence tools or weapons. (Palantir is named for the fictional surveillance spheres depicted as powerful panopticons in The Lord of the Rings trilogy.)

Thiel has used another corporation, Per Aspera Policy Inc., to drive money into various elections backing politicians who want to make it harder for Americans to vote. The group backed Kris Kobach’s unsuccessful 2018 gubernatorial run in Kansas and Blake Masters’ attempt to unseat U.S. Senator Mark Kelly in Arizona. Kobach has notoriously sought to disqualify American voters with common names–and his campaign even hired a social media contractor who repeatedly “posted hateful comments about Jews and racial minorities on a white nationalist website” (the aide was fired after that story broke). Masters is known for his support for white nationalism and anti-Black rhetoric.

Per Aspera also spent big to get JD Vance elected to the U.S. Senate for Ohio in 2022. Vance, who previously worked closely with Thiel in venture capital, was swept into elected office with a record-breaking $15 million in funding from Thiel. Vance was later chosen by Trump to be his running mate in the 2024 presidential election.

Now, Per Aspera is directing money into Virginia through a group that calls itself “Justice for Democracy PAC,” and is targeting Black households with grossly misleading mailers. Some use “Klan imagery,” while others feature Barack Obama and the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., (without their permission or their estate’s) alongside assertions that the redistricting proposal being voted on this month will hurt Black representation. Those claims run counter to public statements from Obama, who has specifically weighed in for the new maps, calling them essential to level the playing field. Almost all Black elected officials in Virginia, including state legislative leaders like Louise Lucas and Don Scott, along with Congressman Bobby Scott and others, strongly back the measure.

On paper, that PAC is led by A.C. Cordoza, a controversial Black Republican who lost his state seat in 2025, but the funding traces back to Thiel, a controversial white billionaire.

Thiel has publicly claimed “there is no problem with racism” and that “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Why would–or should–anyone trust any ads meant to influence our democracy and elections that are funded by a tech billionaire who has expressed hostility toward our very system of government?

A biography published in 2021 also reported that Thiel told some of his Stanford Law School classmates that South Africa’s racial apartheid system was “economically sound,” a claim he has since denied (he spent part of his childhood in South Africa and Namibia). In 2024, The Guardian reported that leaked materials indicated Thiel had flown a eugenicist engaged in “race science”–who has made claims about racial hierarchies–to talks in Silicon Valley; Thiel did not respond to the outlet’s requests for comment.

Thiel also co-authored a book called “The Diversity Myth,” attacking the idea of multiculturalism at universities (he later apologized for asserting in the book that date rapes were just “seductions that are later regretted” by women).

Notably, Per Aspera’s corporate filing was signed by Trevor Stanley, a partner at the law firm of BakerHostetler, who previously represented Republicans opposing changes to absentee voting in Virginia during the Covid-19 pandemic. Stanley was legal counsel to Kanye West in Virginia during West’s brief 2020 presidential run–a stint widely seen as designed to peel away Democratic votes for Joe Biden. Among other legal work, Stanley also represented amicus lawyers in a North Carolina case involving Republican efforts to make it harder to vote. An appellate court ultimately rejected those measures, finding that they violated the Voting Rights Act and related legal precedents.

Election lawyer Marc Elias’s Democracy Docket has reported on the flurry of ads in Virginia being fueled by Per Aspera and Cordoza’s PAC. As of April 1, Thiel’s group had given the operation at least $2.5 million. Virginia Attorney General Jay Jones accused the PAC’s ad campaign of being “built on lies and racial division,” asserting that they “deliberately exploit the history of Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Movement to mislead Black voters and suppress participation.”

We will see next week if the Thiel-backed smear campaign succeeds or is rejected by Virginia voters. Meanwhile, the hyper-partisan Roberts Court is considering an even broader pro-Republican ruling in the Louisiana v. Callais case this summer. Stay tuned for more from Grave Injustice on the story behind that case and its implications.

Subscribe now

Share

What I’m Reading:

• David Daley’s Antidemocratic: Inside the Far Right’s 50-Year Plot to Control American Elections

  • I’m re-reading this because, as Heather Cox Richardson noted, Daley’s book is “chilling and convincing … a must-read.” (I confess he kindly thanked me for my research in his acknowledgements.)

• Marc Elias’s Democracy Docket

  • This site provides reliable and compelling updates on the battle to protect the right to vote, being led by Elias, his team, and their colleagues.

• My chapter of John Roberts’s efforts to undermine the Voting Rights Act in my book Without Precedent, along with the congressional debates over the ratification of the 14th and 15th Amendments to secure voting rights for Black men freed from slavery in the midst of the Civil War.

COURIER’s newly-launched Epstein investigation project

For too long, the Epstein Class has dealt in wealth, power, and politics to avoid accountability and deny victims & survivors their due justice. The public deserves the truth, but the Trump Administration is failing its legal obligation to deliver it.

That’s why we’re expanding our coverage to follow the money and investigate the power players in and outside the government. With a new database by Thorian AI, we have unprecedented access and ability to navigate more than 1.2M files and we’re sharing access—and what we’re finding—with you.

Subscribe to The Cover-Up and get one concise, easy-to-read email a week that cuts through the noise with the headlines you need and the breakdowns you want.

By staying plugged in and leveraging our reporting to make your own calls-to-action louder, together, we can turn information into justice.

Subscribe now

“I can’t believe … you think [it]’s normal or good that one person can dictate who the Department of Justice investigates and indicts,” the moderator of the American Bar Association’s “Rule of Law” panel recently said in response to remarks by John Lauro. Lauro, who represented Donald Trump after he was indicted for criminal interference in the 2020 election, replied: “That’s what the Supreme Court said,” referring to John Roberts’ opinion in the hyper-partisan ruling that invented criminal immunity for Trump.

It is neither normal nor good for a president to dictate DOJ investigations. But that is exactly what is happening in the aftermath of the reckless edict Roberts orchestrated for the leader of the political party that elevated him to Chief Justice.

Subscribe now

While presidents can set broad policies for DOJ–such as prioritizing the prevention of school shootings–no president since Richard Nixon has sought to abuse the Department of Justice to protect himself from prosecution or to go after his enemies, until Trump. For decades, DOJ guidelines have required impartiality and the insulation of prosecutorial decisions from political influence, as Sarah Wilson noted in a Miller Center report. Since 1939, for example, the Hatch Act has also barred federal employees from using their official authority or influence to interfere with elections. That law and related guardrails have long been reinforced in DOJ and White House policies and memoranda.

Yet Lauro, enabling his former client’s self-victimization, contends that no one has been more “abused” by the criminal justice system than Trump– a risible talking point that was recently reiterated by another one of Trump’s former criminal defense lawyers: Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche.

In his first press conference after Pam Bondi’s firing, Blanche blithely defended Trump’s directives to prosecute his political enemies, going as far as to claim: “That is his right, and indeed it is his duty to do that, meaning to lead this country.” Blanche insisted that the only thing keeping him up at night was not Trump’s demands, but the need to “investigate every case that we have to the fullest extent of the law.”

Blanche also repeated Trump’s discredited claims about the “weaponization” of DOJ, ignoring that neither President Joe Biden nor Attorney General Merrick Garland pushed for a criminal investigation into his activities. Instead, Garland belatedly appointed a special counsel, under long-standing DOJ regulations, to independently investigate January 6 and Trump’s stealing away of classified documents. That independent review process has been used repeatedly by DOJ in order to avoid the politicization of prosecution decisions.

Blanche even had the audacity to dismiss reporting that Trump “wants to go after his political enemies” as “completely false,” framing the president’s demands as merely the pursuit of “justice”–which is a highly disturbing way of describing the very thing he claims to not be doing. Blanche, who is seemingly auditioning for the official job of Attorney General, also glorified the removal of federal prosecutors involved in the lawful investigations of Trump because–and get this–he claimed:

If you were a prosecutor and you were trying to prosecute your boss, you have ethical duties as a lawyer that I think prevent you from continuing to work in that environment. And … you had prosecutors that were absolutely not doing the right thing. And so, none of those prosecutors ... I hope everybody agrees that they shouldn’t work here if you’re not doing the right thing.

There is no such duty not to prosecute your boss if your boss is a criminal and your job is to prosecute criminals. Such a claim should be disqualifying for any DOJ appointee.

But the related reality is that John Roberts has made this disaster possible. By orchestrating a counter-constitutional ruling blocking Trump’s criminal prosecution, he effectively pardoned Trump and paved the way for his return to power, as I discuss in my new book, Without Precedent.

That illegitimate edict is also enabling Trump’s DOJ appointees to revive his debunked lies about supposed voter fraud in the 2020 election. In Georgia, for example, Blanche and Bondi’s handpicked prosecutor has apparently been working closely with Trump loyalists/conspiracy theorists to assail the election results in Fulton County, even though the five million votes cast there have been counted, re-counted, and counted again–as Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has repeatedly attested.

Trump lost.

Nevertheless, at his behest, the FBI seized hundreds of pallets of ballots based on claims that they were not retained for 22 months as required by law, despite plain evidence that they were retained for more than five years. These facts did not prevent the issuance of an indictment for a supposed crime that would be beyond the statute of limitations even if proven. Plus, as Fulton County’s lawsuit challenging the seizure notes: the Trump administration did not tell the judicial officer who signed off that they were relying significantly on witnesses whose claims had been previously discredited.

None of this is normal or should be normalized.

But the broader responsibility lies with Roberts’ counter-constitutional immunity ruling, which asserted that presidential control over prosecutions is “conclusive and preclusive.” Roberts took that phrase out of context from a case where the Supreme Court ruled against President Truman in his attempt to control the production of American steel mills (it had nothing to do with prosecutions). Roberts wielded that phrase more than 20 times in his destructive opinion, as if repetition were a magical incantation that would transform his political assertions into an ironclad truth.

In that edict, Roberts claimed that because the Executive Branch has “exclusive authority and absolute discretion” over which crimes to investigate and prosecute, including alleged election crimes, the president can dictate who to prosecute. In shutting down special counsel Jack Smith’s prosecution of the grand jury’s charges against Trump, Roberts claimed that the “indictment’s allegations that the requested investigations were shams or proposed for an improper purpose do not divest the President of exclusive authority over the investigative and prosecutorial functions of the Justice Department and its officials.”

Those judicially-concocted claims–plus Trump’s vendettas and disproven lies–are precisely why we are now contending with a DOJ acting like it can do his bidding without facing any adverse consequences. The Republican-led Senate is also to blame for stupidly and cravenly confirming Trump’s defense attorneys to DOJ positions of power.

This crisis we are in has many authors, but Roberts and Trump are central players in the felling of vital, long-standing constraints on the abuse of prosecutorial power.

A reckoning must eventually come, but meanwhile we are living through the wreckage John Roberts has unleashed on America.

Subscribe now

Share

What I’m Reading:

• Injustice: How Politics and Fear Vanquished America’s Justice Department by Carol Leonnig and Aaron Davis

  • This is a must-read report from investigative reporters examining how DOJ has failed to protect our democracy.

• Trump v. United States

  • Every time I read John Roberts’ claims in this ruling I am more and more appalled at how deeply destructive and outrageously arrogant it is in its destruction of the rule of law in America.

• And, of course, the U.S. Constitution.

COURIER’s newly-launched Epstein investigation project

For too long, the Epstein Class has dealt in wealth, power, and politics to avoid accountability and deny victims & survivors their due justice. The public deserves the truth, but the Trump Administration is failing its legal obligation to deliver it.

That’s why we’re expanding our coverage to follow the money and investigate the power players in and outside the government. With a new database by Thorian AI, we have unprecedented access and ability to navigate more than 1.2M files and we’re sharing access—and what we’re finding—with you.

Subscribe to The Cover-Up and get one concise, easy-to-read email a week that cuts through the noise with the headlines you need and the breakdowns you want.

By staying plugged in and leveraging our reporting to make your own calls-to-action louder, together, we can turn information into justice.

Subscribe now

On April Fool’s Day, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Trump v. Barbara, a case challenging Donald Trump’s claim that he has the power to strip Americans of their citizenship. Trump showed up at the Supreme Court building to be present for the assertions of his Solicitor General, John Sauer, but left before the arguments of Cecillia Wang from the ACLU. His appearance made headlines, despite its actual insignificance.

Many reporters jumped on a narrative that painted the questioning by Chief Justice John Roberts and other Republican appointees as a kind of heroic skepticism. But that misses the point. Sauer tried to transform Trump’s hideous whims and fringe theories into legally binding mandates, and any justice who goes along with such flagrantly counter-constitutional claims should be decisively hounded out of office.

Subscribe now

Here are three things everyone should know.

1. Only an unrepentant Trump sycophant would rule in his favor on this issue

The Constitution is explicit: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

As the Supreme Court ruled more than 100 years ago in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, that opening line of the 14th Amendment guarantees that everyone born in the U.S. is a citizen, with only a few specific exceptions–children of foreign diplomats and of enemy forces during an occupation.

To serve Trump’s agenda, Sauer concocted a spiderweb of Glenn Beck-style arguments asserting that Americans born to temporary U.S. residents or undocumented immigrants could be denied citizenship by any president. But no court has ever read the Constitution’s “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” text that way. The U.S. has always considered nearly everyone in the country to be subject to its jurisdiction, aside from those narrow exceptions noted above. (Meanwhile, in no other setting has Trump ever questioned DHS’ power to seize immigrants and subject them to our laws; if anything, he and his minions have urged agents to exceed the bounds of law to assail them.)

Sauer also claimed that only children of parents with “allegiance” to the U.S. can be citizens, but that is not at all what the 14th Amendment commands. It’s not even something that could be claimed of all of the Africans enslaved here before the Emancipation Proclamation–yet the Constitution nonetheless ordered American citizenship for them and their children, as Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson noted, based on the actual history. Plus, as Justice Amy Coney Barrett pointed out, does the administration really plan to depose pregnant women about their allegiances or their “domicile?”

Because the Supreme Court noted that Wong Kim Ark’s parents were “domiciled” in the U.S., Sauer tried to twist that dicta from the recitation of the facts into a condition for citizenship. It is not. Ultimately, Wong Kim Ark’s parents returned to China; U.S. law barred them from citizenship but not their son, who only had to establish that other Americans knew he was born here and remembered him from his childhood.

Of course, ultra MAGA justice Samuel Alito tried to advance Sauer’s effort to make a mountain out of a molehill. Even some of the Democratic appointees seemed to fall under Sauer’s spell briefly by acknowledging that the word “domicil” (sic) was mentioned 22 times in Wong Kim Ark’s case. But most of those references were about how domicile (a $10 word for home, or the place where someone intends to return or sink roots) was irrelevant to the command of the 14th Amendment. In fact, the Supreme Court in Wong Kim Ark’s case made clear that the children of “temporary sojourners” (visitors) were U.S. citizens if born here, under the longstanding common law of the U.S. and England conferring citizenship based on birthplace.

Sauer tried repeatedly to sidestep the holding in that case and pushed claims about the language in previous and subsequent immigration statutes. Accordingly, Sauer also focused some of his time on the congressional debate over a statute related to the 14th Amendment, even though establishing legislative or “original intent” through the statements of individual legislators for or against a provision can easily be cherry-picked and is fraught for other reasons. For example, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 barred discrimination against all women, but the men who added that amendment proposed it as a poison pill to kill the bill–they never actually intended for women to get access to equal rights through that landmark law.

Plus, so-called “originalism” has been exposed as an optional political rather than principled tool by its proponents, not least by the Roberts Court’s invention of criminal immunity for Trump, in defiance of the Constitution and the discernable “original intent.”

2. Trump continues to try to defy the Constitution he swore to uphold

After Sauer’s argument, Trump posted on social media: “We are the only Country in the World STUPID enough to allow ‘Birthright’ Citizenship!”

That’s not true–more than 30 other countries follow “jus soli,” or birthright citizenship, too. But it is also besides the point. The countries that don’t do so are not governed by our Constitution, which follows the English common law rule dating back to the 1600s that citizenship is based on birth–meaning territory–with the narrow exceptions noted above.

If Trump wants to change that, he must work to propose and ratify an amendment to the Constitution–but he definitely does not have the votes needed to do so. He just claims he can dictate his desires, despite the law as Jamelle Bouie recounted.

The reality is that minutes after John Roberts administered the oath of office to Donald Trump on January 20, 2025–the oath that promises to faithfully execute the laws of the U.S. and defend the Constitution–Trump issued an executive order defying its plain command on birthright citizenship. This blatant disregard for the law came after Roberts’ own unprecedented and anticonstitutional ruling, giving Trump immunity from criminal prosecution, helped effectively pardon him and clear the path for his return to power.

Immediately after regaining said power, Trump began defying the Constitution.

Not only that, the Roberts Court then aided him immensely–limiting lower courts’ ability to issue national temporary restraining orders in cases challenging his executive edict against birthright citizenship. The Court also allowed Trump to bypass the normal appellate review by the circuit and come directly to the Supreme Court with his claims.

Instead of letting the standard process play out and summarily affirm a ruling against Trump, a majority of the judges appointed to the Supreme Court chose not to do so.

Notably, Sauer also tried to claim the president can unilaterally block birthright citizenship because there are some companies selling travel to pregnant women to give birth here (which still does not change the Constitution). Meanwhile, investigative reporting showed that Trump profited from such tourism by pregnant Russians staying at his properties in Florida. On top of all that, there is the hypocrisy of him promoting a scheme he calls the “Trump Gold Card,” which allows super-rich foreigners to buy American citizenship for a $5 million fee.

3. The attack on birthright citizenship is brought to us by the same man who filled Trump with delusional notions about overturning the 2020 election

Although Trump has railed against so-called “anchor babies” or “chain migration” since his 2016 campaign, the legal agenda to strip Americans of birthright citizenship is a special project of John Eastman. He’s the Trump confidante and former clerk of Clarence Thomas who, in 2021, played a central role in pushing for Mike Pence to block the certification of the Electoral College and promote what special counsel Jack Smith rightly called “fraudulent electors.” Eastman has since faced bar complaints and severe judicial criticism for his conduct in trying to block the lawful, peaceful transfer of power in the aftermath of Trump’s loss to Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election.

Eastman also filed an amicus brief supporting Trump in the case before the Roberts Court, on behalf of the Claremont Institute, a right-wing operation fueled by Thomas Klingenstein. Klingenstein, who chairs the Claremont operation, also funded Clarence Thomas’s 2020 vanity biopic along with Harlan Crow and other billionaires–as True North Research detailed a few years ago. A super-rich investor, Klingenstein has strongly defended Eastman’s role in 2020 and beyond.

The bottom line now is that the Roberts Court has legitimated the extreme revisionism of Eastman and his ilk by giving a case that could have been summarily affirmed against Trump a very high-profile platform–the forum of the nation’s highest court.

If, somehow, five or six Republican appointees are willing to rip the Constitution apart for Trump–as they did with immunity–it seems clear that it would not stop here. Once the groundwork to strip future Americans of their citizenship is laid, Trump and his backers would surely seek to do the same retroactively, as Madiba Dennie emphasized. They could reach back decades, denying passports for firmly established U.S. citizens and even destroying their right to live in their home country: America.

It is not beyond imagination to envision Trump relishing efforts to strip Kamala Harris of her American citizenship because her parents were foreign students in the U.S. After all, it was John Eastman himself who advanced the execrable claim, before the 2024 election, that supposedly Harris should not be eligible to run for president because of her parents’ status. If Trump were to win such a case, she could be just one of millions of Americans who would be harmed by another reckless ruling by the Roberts Court.

If the Court decides, however, to actually rule in accord with the Constitution and against Trump, it will only be because–like in the tariff case–the Constitution leaves no room for his claim. But the same was true in the immunity case and Roberts still invented a fictional doctrine to shield him from his abuses of presidential power.

Meanwhile, Roberts is poised to decimate the Voting Rights Act, and a ruling against Trump on birthright citizenship would give Roberts cover with the chattering class. Both-sideism pundits would likely emphasize that Trump doesn’t win 100% of the time with the Court (even though it has ruled for Trump almost all the time since 2024).

Subscribe now

Share

What I’m Reading:

• Erika Lee’s At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943

  • This book tells a story few Americans know about anti-Chinese racism.

• Garrett Epps’ Democracy Reborn: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Fight for Equal Rights in Post-Civil War America

  • This book details how equal rights became a constitutional command.

• And, the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, of course.

P.S. I’m sorry to have been away for a bit. My beloved sister-in-law, Ellen Hanson, was fighting a fierce battle against cancer and passed away last month. That was really hard and I will miss her immensely. She encouraged me to keep fighting for our rights no matter what, so I am glad to be back on deck and back to promoting my book on John Roberts, Without Precedent, which becomes more timely with each passing day.

Over the past 24 hours, two countries have demonstrated what it means for no one to be above the law – an increasingly stark contrast to what is happening in America under the rules invented by John Roberts and his fellow Republican appointees to the U.S. Supreme Court. Much of the destruction happening in the U.S. traces back to Roberts and his destructive and counter-constitutional grant of immunity to Donald Trump.

In the United Kingdom, Thames Valley police arrested Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the former Duke of York, on charges of misconduct in public office based on revelations in the Epstein Files. The King of England responded to his brother’s arrest by affirming, “Let me state clearly: the law must take its course,” adding that investigators “have our full and wholehearted support and co-operation.” Even before the U.S. Department of Justice’s most recent partial release of the Epstein Files, Mountbatten-Windsor had been embroiled in controversy due to his long and close relationship with the notorious sexual predators Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.

Over a decade ago, Virginia (Roberts) Giuffre publicly alleged that Epstein and Maxwell engaged in illegal sex trafficking of her and other girls and women. In particular, she attested that she was trafficked to the man then known as Prince Andrew for sexual acts in London when she was 17 and later at Epstein’s infamous island compound on Little St. James. Though he denied wrongdoing, Mountbatten-Windsor settled her later civil lawsuit against him in 2022 and made a donation to a charity supporting survivors of sexual abuse.

Subscribe now

The criminal charges filed this week against him involve “misconduct in public office.”

That’s one way of describing the very thing John Roberts illegitimately sought to shield Trump from. Roberts coordinated with his fellow Republican appointees to concoct a broad and unprecedented grant of immunity from criminal prosecution for Trump for anything he claims is an “official act.” The actual allegations and evidence before the Court detailed Trump’s deeply damaging “misconduct in public office” in trying to subvert Americans’ votes: fomenting the January 6 insurrection, trying to get fake electors appointed to disrupt the Electoral College vote, and pressuring officials in Georgia to declare him the winner despite him losing the popular vote in the state, including in Fulton County.

Elsewhere, in South Korea, a Seoul District Court sentenced the country’s former president Yoon Suk-Yeol to life in prison for “abusing his authority and leading an insurrection related to his imposition of martial law in late 2024,” according to translated press accounts. The presiding judges noted that, as president, Suk-Yeol “directly and proactively planned the offense,” which “resulted in enormous social costs,” and that “it has been difficult to find any indication that the defendant has expressed remorse regarding this.” The same could be said of Trump, as former Special Counsel Jack Smith described the proof beyond a reasonable doubt that had been assembled before Roberts intervened – effectively pardoning Trump and paving the way for his return to power.

Likewise, the courts in Brazil convicted former president Jair Bolsonaro of a conspiracy to “violently dismantle” the democratic rule of law and overthrow his electoral defeat. Last November, he was sentenced to 27 years in prison for plotting that coup. Trump has since tried to pressure Brazil to exonerate him (like Roberts did for Trump). Brazil has declined.

Accountability for crimes by elected officials – and even those of royal birth – is advancing everywhere but in the United States. It’s not all John Roberts’ fault. Years earlier, Alex Acosta, a George W. Bush appointee to the post of U.S. Attorney, cut the dirty plea deal that allowed Epstein to avoid more severe federal charges, despite substantial evidence of widespread abuse of underage girls.

And, though career prosecutors in the first Trump administration were allowed to pursue charges against Epstein and Maxwell, in Trump’s second term, his approach has changed. His hand-picked political appointees at the Justice Department – Pam Bondi and Todd Blanche, both former defense attorneys for Trump – have taken a different tack. For example, they oversaw decisions including moving Maxwell from the prison she was originally serving her twenty-year sentence to a minimum security Club Fed style prison camp, where she is “much, much happier.”

For decades after Richard Nixon tried to direct the Justice Department to protect him from criminal liability, no president had dared to try to do the same, and long-standing agreements of separation between DOJ and successive White Houses prevented such interference.

What changed? John Roberts, in his illegitimate immunity ruling, gave Trump the green light to direct the Justice Department’s investigations and actions. Then, with the help of Senate Republicans, Trump installed two loyalists willing to do his bidding at the top of DOJ.

Not only have they been wielding criminal law to pursue Trump’s political enemies, they are actively preventing the full release of the Epstein Files, in what some contend is the biggest cover-up in DOJ history. Bondi told Trump last May that he was mentioned repeatedly in the files and then tried to stall their release, but Congress ultimately ordered their disclosure – with protections for the survivors and victims. She and Blanche seemingly spent hours approving redactions to the thousands and thousands of mentions of Trump, as well as the names of most of the men involved, while also managing to release the identities and other details about numerous girls and women.

Under Bondi and Blanche, DOJ has not charged anyone with an Epstein-related crime. They have not even bothered to interview the victims of the men whose names they redacted, which Bondi refused to apologize for. She even asserted that there is no evidence of potential crimes by Trump, despite evidence that needs to be investigated.

Other countries are taking this much more seriously. Norway’s former Prime Minister Thorbjørn Jagland, for example, was just charged with gross corruption over his ties to Epstein. In the U.S., Blanche had the audacity to state that it is no crime to party with Epstein, as Trump had repeatedly – sidestepping the allegations in the files.

He and Bondi act like people who know they will never be held accountable for their roles in this cover-up or anything else, while they say they have done nothing wrong. Perhaps that is because in the pernicious immunity ruling John Roberts orchestrated, he also sought to set the pardon power beyond any review.

So now we have a president who can commit crimes with impunity and pardon his accomplices – just like he did with the violent insurrectionists who attacked our Capitol on January 6, as he incited them to do. The violence in Minneapolis and other cities by ICE agents also seems emboldened by the notion that they too can get a piece of the immunity pie.

On issue after issue, it is Roberts’ original sin in the despicable grant of immunity that has emboldened Trump’s worst instincts. Roberts has unraveled the rule of law from the inside, even as lower court judges, for the most part, valiantly try to enforce the rules and laws in America.

No wonder Trump told Roberts a year ago: “Thank you again. Thank you again. Won’t forget it.” Earlier this month, he said of the chief justice: “‘I had the nastiest, most vicious joke about John Roberts. If you think I’m going to tell that joke you can forget it.’” ‘I’m going to kiss his ass for a long time,’ he added, an apparent reference to the role Roberts could play in deciding current and future cases involving Trump and his administration.”

But it’s not a joke. It’s a real-life ongoing disaster. And it is up to we the people to honor the principle that King Charles reminded us of: the law must take its course. Through our voices and our votes, we must rebuke the Roberts Court and demand that justice and the rule of law – the vital principle that no one is above the law – be restored.

Subscribe now

Share

What I’m Reading:

• Paul Krugman’s latest column, “Turning Our Back on Clean Energy,” mentions the Roberts Court.

  • He notes how the nation’s highest court has been captured and how it has advanced the agenda of the most powerful companies and people.

• Jose Andres’ book Change the Recipe: Because You Can’t Build a Better World Without Breaking Some Eggs

  • This is a truly inspiring memoir about World Central Kitchen and how we can help make our world a better place.

• The Declaration of Independence, of course.

State of the Swamp

Join DEFIANCE.org and COURIER at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. on February 24th for the State of the Swamp, a rebuttal to Trump’s State of the Union.

Opposition figures, current and former elected officials, celebrities, and other leaders will gather to tell the truth and to counter Donald Trump’s lies. Speakers include Robert DeNiro, Jim Acosta, Mehdi Hasan, and Senator Ron Wyden.

Use discount code COURIER15 for 15% off tickets

RSVP

The COURIER team is growing and we need you!

These new hires will have the opportunity to shape how we launch in new regions and build trust from the ground up. You can see the full job descriptions on our Careers Page here.

If you know of anyone who might be a strong fit—or could help spread the word—let us know! Email info@couriernewsroom.com.

Click here to join live at 3pm!

Share

Our screens are filled with heartbreaking images of the gang of marauders Donald Trump has inflicted on Minneapolis killing yet another American, ER nurse Alex Pretti, in cold blood. And, again, Trump’s top lieutenants rushed to defend the outrageous violence, immediately responding by smearing him and trying to murder the truth in broad daylight and with malice aforethought.

None of this would be happening if John Roberts had not invented immunity for Trump, whose violent wishes incited other loyalists to attack our Capitol on January 6, resulting in the deaths of five Capitol Police officers and the wounding of 140 others. Roberts, along with three Trump appointees and two other Republicans whose wives also compromised their impartiality, connived to rip up the rule of law for Trump, as I detail in my book, Without Precedent. Roberts himself orchestrated and wrote the reckless edict that freed Trump from facing a jury and the substantial evidence of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt assembled by federal prosecutor Jack Smith.

Subscribe now

No wonder Trump went out of his way last March to enthusiastically thank Roberts, who paved the way for his return to power and illegitimately aggrandized him with more power than he’d ever had. For months before that foul ruling, Trump had been promising to pardon the 900+ people who were convicted of crimes against our nation on January 6. In his opinion in Trump v. United States, Roberts went even further, seeking to cement the notion that a president’s pardons are “official acts” beyond any judicial or legislative review or constraint. Almost one year ago today, after the Roberts Six helped sweep Trump back into power, he pardoned more than 1,500 of his rioters who violently tried to keep him in office after he lost the 2020 presidential election.

And now we are witnessing the results of Trump unleashing more than 3,000 heavily armed agents in Minneapolis and beyond. His swarming surrogates were loudly–and wrongly–told by Trump’s vice president, JD Vance, that they have “absolute immunity” in the aftermath of Jonathan Ross killing Renee Nicole Good by shooting her point-blank through the left temple as her car turned away from him. Trump appointee Kristi Noem perversely called the Minnesota mom—who told Ross “I’m not mad at you,” moments before he killed her—a “terrorist,” but the only ones terrorizing the residents of Minneapolis-St. Paul are those who report to Noem.

Trump’s adjutants at the heads of the Department of Justice and the FBI–Pam Bondi and Kash Patel–have actively blocked Minnesota law enforcement from investigating Good’s homicide, pushed for Good’s wife to be prosecuted, and have kept police away from vital evidence–resulting in six federal prosecutors and an FBI agent resigning. And Trump’s proxies are doing the same again. After Pretti was shot, his stormtroopers again did nothing to try to save his life; instead they counted the bullet holes. Two Trump thugs fired ten bullets to execute Pretti and then fled the scene of the crime, with their faces masked and their identities cloaked. Now Bondi is attempting to extort Minnesota’s voter rolls in exchange for ending Trump’s violent siege of the Twin Cities.

This blatant abuse of power–and the reckless assertion of absolute immunity itself–warrants impeaching Trump, Vance, Noem, Bondi, and Patel, along with imposing criminal and civil liability for the violent destruction they have unleashed and condoned in Minnesota and elsewhere. Their underlings–including Stephen Miller, Greg Bovino, and Todd Lyons–also need to be held accountable for deliberately depriving people of their rights while praising the killers. Modern history provides many precedents for how independent tribunals have held government actors accountable for violating human rights. A Minnesota Supreme Court judge, William Christianson, presided over key Nuremberg trials, which St. Paul resident, Captain Horace Hansen, helped prosecute, as the Minnesota Military & Veterans Museum in Little Falls marked in November. Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker is using a “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” to collect ICE crimes. State and federal legislative committees can also conduct investigations.

Every state must also review its criminal and tort laws to ensure they are adequate to respond to Trump’s round-up gangs and their illegal, violent actions. If not, states should enact emergency legislation akin to the Ku Klux Klan Act (42 USC 1983) to ensure that any federal agent “who, under color of any statute, ordinance, regulation, custom, or usage, … subjects, or causes to be subjected, any citizen of the United States [or their state] or other person within the jurisdiction thereof to the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution and laws [including the state Constitution and statutes], shall be liable to the party injured in an action at law, suit in equity, or other proper proceeding for redress.” Justice cannot wait forever, and litigation and litigators, like Democracy Forward and the ACLU, need support to pursue it.

Advertise in this newsletter

Do you or your company want to support COURIER’s mission and showcase your products or services to an aligned audience of 190,000+ subscribers at the same time? Contact advertising@couriernewsroom.com for more information.

Additionally, if current defamation laws are not robust enough, let’s reform them, too. Maybe the law needs to be strengthened to make it clear that murder victims and their families–as well as states, cities, towns, and state or local officials–can sue Trump and his defenders for their slander. To reduce barriers, perhaps the law should be changed to allow families and governments to be reimbursed for their legal fees and expenses, and defamation damages for the surviving families should be set exceptionally high. Why not? Every lawful tool available to secure justice should be on the table.

On behalf of the people they are elected to represent, state leaders should also consider making clear that any assertion of immunity from criminal or civil law will be considered null and void when federal agents are operating within state borders without its governor’s consent. We should let juries decide the facts, including any purported claim of self-defense, without allowing fabricated impunity to block accountability.

Why should we accept claims of federal supremacy when the federal government is being used as an illegitimate tool to punish states that did not vote for Trump and as a weapon to gain access to voter rolls? Plus, until the reckless funding of these roving bands of attackers that was pushed through by cowardly Trump-backers can be clawed back, it seems clear we need better state laws to protect our rights. Penalize uninvited agents who hide their faces. Fine them if they don’t wear nametags and turn over body-cams. Prosecute them for fleeing crime scenes. Anyone, no matter their title, who helps conceal the identities of killers should be charged as an accessory after the fact or with obstruction of justice. This crisis demands new and bold thinking.

Secret police have no place in America.

They have no right to kill Americans who peaceably assemble and dissent, who blow whistles, or who film the agents’ violent acts. They have no right to maim or blind witnesses. They have no right to kill a lawfully armed American with a holstered gun. They have no right to break down doors of people’s homes or shatter their car windows without a warrant issued by an impartial judge based on real evidence of a crime–or an actual emergency to save someone’s life. They have no right to disturb our peace.

Just as Trump does not have a right to shoot someone on Fifth Avenue, despite his menacing jokes, his agents have no legitimate license to kill our First, Second, Fourth, and Fifth Amendment rights, which apply to citizens and immigrants alike (expressly to “people” or “persons”). The founding generation, which demanded those rights be written into binding law before voting to ratify the Constitution, had seen firsthand how liberties were arrogantly violated by the redcoats, who asserted the power of writs of assistance–general warrants that allowed them to invade people’s homes. So where are the judges on the nation’s highest court who repeatedly invoked so-called “originalism” to dismantle precedents like Roe.

It sure seems like it was just marketing by them, along with Leonard Leo’s Federalist Society. Where are those supposedly principled “conservative” lawyers, those summer soldiers, now, in these times that try our hearts and souls? We the People have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and no president—MAGA or otherwise—should have the power to trample on those rights and abuse our cities. Standing united against secret police in America should be uncontroversial, but FOX and other stenographers continue to replay Team Trump’s made-for-TV claims in spite of the facts.

No one should enjoy immunity for giving or following illegal orders that plainly violate our Bill of Rights. No president should be allowed to pardon people who break the law at his behest or immunize his co-conspirators in the deprivation of our rights.

As Rep. Jamie Raskin recently wrote, January 6 never ended. Trump’s ongoing insurrection–enabled by the Roberts Court–continues in his attacks on our laws, our neighbors, and our communities. That includes the harassment known as #KavanaughStops, taking place because the Roberts Court issued shadow docket dictates overturning temporary restraining orders. Now those #KavanaughStops have metastasized into #KavanaughKillings. The predictable and deadly consequences of the Roberts Court’s decrees inventing immunity for the insurrectionist-in-chief–and emboldening him with 20 unprecedented emergency rulings in his favor last year–must be roundly condemned.

The courageous, compassionate nonviolence of Minnesotans is a beacon of hope for what kind of world is possible when we stand together in solidarity. There is so much we are going to need to fix once we prevail, including reforming the Court itself, in order to right the wrongs and help our freedoms thrive. As America marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, let us renew our commitment to each other and to the inalienable rights our founding fathers so bravely proclaimed.

#NoKings #NoKings #NoKings Forever.

Subscribe now

Share

What I’m Reading:

• The American Crisis, a series by Thomas Paine, who wrote Common Sense.

• Judge Michael Luttig’s illuminating analysis of the Declaration of Independence and how Trump’s actions, as of July 4th of last year, aligned with King George.

  • Please watch my interview with Judge Luttig on this constitutional crisis.

• And, the Bill of Rights of our Constitution.

  • That includes the Fifth Amendment, which provides that “no person shall … be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law….”

Substack Live

Please join me this Wednesday 1/28 at 1 PM Eastern for a Substack Live with Camaron Stevenson, COURIER’s national correspondent, about Citizens United, the Roberts Court and more.

Share

ICYMI: Gloves Off is officially live

COURIER founder and publisher Tara McGowan kicked off her new show with Rep. Jasmine Crockett in a candid, yet hopeful conversation about power, courage, and what real leadership actually looks like. Stream the first episode now on YouTube, Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

Support COURIER’s Journalism

With newsrooms in eleven states, COURIER is one of the fastest-growing, values-driven local news networks in the country.

We need support from folks like you who believe in our mission and support our unique journalism model. Thank you.

Donate

Today marks the anniversary of the Citizens United decision, issued in 2010 by a partisan group of judges on the U.S. Supreme Court.

That ruling has profoundly degraded the American political system in the 16 years since, allowing the ultra wealthy to throw their weight behind politicians and policies that benefit them, often at the expense of the rest of us. In that edict, the nation’s highest court–helmed by Chief Justice John Roberts–grafted onto our First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech the radical notion that money is speech, and that Congress has no power to restrict such “speech” (that is, spending) by outside groups seeking to influence elections.

The Roberts Court claimed that such spending would be of little value if it could not be controlled by the candidate, even though it is self-evidently valuable to have others get their hands dirty on attack ads while candidates maintain a plausible distance. The ruling is also illegitimate because Clarence Thomas failed to recuse himself even though his billionaire benefactor–big-time Republican donor and Nazi memorabilia collector Harlan Crow–had secretly bankrolled Thomas’s wife Ginni with a $500K donation to help her launch a Tea Party group poised to exploit the 5-4 ruling where her husband was about to cast the decisive fifth vote.

As of 2023, Crow had spent at least $13.8 million influencing federal elections since Citizens United.

Subscribe now

Building on that farce, subsequent judicial decisions have struck down limits on contributions to “independent expenditure committees,” allowing billionaires to spend unlimited amounts to affect election outcomes, provided their names are disclosed. Other rulings allowed nonprofit groups, called (c)(4)s, to donate to Super PACs while disclosing only the group’s name. The (c)(4)s routinely keep their big donors secret.

It is a complex chess game the Roberts Court has been playing with American democracy, one that has decimated anti-corruption reforms designed to limit the power of the super rich in the representative democracy America presents itself to be.

Let’s consider one of the most dramatically disruptive and recent consequences of Citizens United and its progeny: Donald Trump’s assault on Greenland’s independence.

Trump’s menacing words and actions are shattering alliances that have helped keep Americans safe for decades. The unnerving situation we and the world find ourselves in is not just the consequence of Trump’s egomaniacal and seemingly demented threats. It is also a world-shaking effect of America’s broken “campaign finance” and anti-corruption system, which is directly due to the partisan interference of the Roberts Court in election law–and in creating anti-constitutional criminal immunity for Trump.

How did we get to the brink of a hot war with Denmark, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the European Union? The answer is money in U.S. politics, money that is now proving to have disastrous effects not only here at home, but on a global scale.

It is also a combination of greed and Trump’s obsession with dominating people and places. As he once told Billy Bush, there was a pretty woman he wanted “to f*ck” so, though she was married, he “moved on her like a b*tch” and “failed.” But this time, it is not a woman–or unwilling women, like E. Jean Carroll–but an unwilling island bound to Denmark and the European Union, some of America’s closest allies.

According to The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021, the origin of Trump’s plan to take over Greenland was spawned by Ron Lauder, a billionaire heir to the Estée Lauder cosmetic fortune, who backed Trump’s election. Here’s the story in that book:

‘A friend of mine, a really, really experienced businessman, thinks we can get Greenland,’ Trump told [National Security Advisor John] Bolton, ‘What do you think?’ Lauder then came to see Bolton, revealing that he had been discussing Greenland with the president and had offered himself up as ‘the back channel to the Danish government to negotiate Greenland,’ as Bolton would later recount.

When the Wall Street Journal broke the news of Trump’s obsession with Greenland in 2019, its ministry responded succinctly that the island was “open for business, not for sale.”

Since Trump returned to the White House in 2025, his fixation has only intensified. Lauder has been stoking the fire from the jump and wrote an op-ed titled “I’m a Greenland expert — these 3 paths can make it America’s next frontier” just days after Trump’s second inauguration. In it, he stated he had “worked closely with Greenland’s business and government leaders for years to develop strategic investments there.” Oh, really? He then touted the rare earth minerals that lie beneath the island’s ice and rock. While Lauder did not propose a military invasion in that op-ed, his talking points about Greenland’s strategic value have been echoed by Trump sycophants like Ted Cruz, in defense of Trump’s goal of just “taking” the big island and his desire for us to “own” it.

Would it surprise you to know that Lauder is invested in pursuing rare earth minerals, including mining operations in Greenland? Maybe not, at this point. But it’s true. And Trump has seemingly been working hard for his benefactors, which include other billionaires, too. From the outset of his second term, Trump has been pressuring the Ukrainian president to trade access to rare earth minerals for U.S. aid. Volodymyr Zelenskyy ultimately gave into that pressure last year.

Who stands to gain from access to those minerals? According to the New York Times, a “consortium including TechMet, an energy investment firm partly owned by the U.S. government, and Ronald S. Lauder, a wealthy friend of Mr. Trump, has engaged with Kyiv to bid on a Ukrainian lithium field.” Earlier this month, Techmet secured a deal with Ukraine. Those fields are valued in the trillions of dollars, and Greenland’s could be, too.

That’s a pretty good potential return on investment. Lauder backed Trump during his 2016 campaign and, after Trump won, the two men were photographed shaking hands at Mar-a-Lago a month later. Trump then reportedly deployed him on secret “diplomatic challenges” in his first term, while Lauder gave $100,000, twice, to the “Trump Victory” PAC.

Though their relationship briefly cooled when Trump was out of power and dined with antisemite Nick Fuentes, their relationship has warmed again with Trump’s re-ascendance. Not only did Lauder continue his push for Trump to get control of Greenland last February, he also gave $5 million to MAGA Inc. last March. They’ve known each other since college, but Citizens United and its progeny have helped amplify Trump’s expectations of tribute for access or favors and his self-aggrandizement as the world’s best dealmaker. As with Venezuela, Trump views Greenland as a way to seem powerful by rewarding those who back him with the spoils he seizes–befitting the only convicted criminal to be elected president in U.S. history. Trump is a walking, talking, grifting result of the influence machinery the Roberts Court let loose.

Lauder has done nothing wrong under the rules the Roberts Court has remade to allow the super-rich to set the policy agenda of elected officials. Those rules permit donors to max out on direct donations and then pour millions more into Super PACs and other groups. Notably, Lauder has spent millions over several years on an attack ad group, initially aligned with the Tea Party, called “National Horizon.” It was created with help from C. Boyden Gray, who worked with Leonard Leo to install all six judges in the Roberts Court majority. Lauder has also been a major funder of an attack-ad group called “Safe Together New York,” which recently settled an investigation alleging unlawful coordination with Republican Lee Zeldin, without conceding any wrongdoing.

Though Lauder is not even the biggest spender among the billionaires currying favor with Trump, his history of spending in politics helps illustrate the impact of Citizens United. In the twenty years before that decision, he gave a total of $681,676 to federal candidates and committees. Since 2010, Lauder has spent over $32 million on candidates and PACs–not including any secret contributions to (c)(4) groups, which remain unknown. Although Lauder was super rich before 2010 and a regular funder of Republicans, only 2% of his political spending happened before the Citizens United ruling when such soft money and dark money spending was more restricted. Overall, 98% of his money in politics came after the Roberts Court blew the dam wide open.

Those millions–like the $5 million he gave to MAGA Inc. last year–are politically potent, but a pittance to him personally. With an estimated net worth of nearly $5 billion from his family fortune and various investments, that $32 million in political spending constitutes just 0.64% of his wealth. That’s like an American household with a median net worth of $192,900 spending $1,234–or roughly $6 a month–on politics since Citizens United. Such comparatively miniscule spending by ordinary voters would never bring America to the brink of war to seize a foreign territory. In a healthy democracy, no one–no matter how good they say their intentions are–should be able to spend so much and wield such outsized influence on our nation’s actions.

Billionaire money to influence elections and divert public policy doesn’t just speak, it yells.

Citizens United has unmoored America’s democracy from its founding aspiration of governance by We the People (the demos), not by kings or their patrons. If our democratic republic is going to survive, we will have to reform the Roberts Court and restore common-sense brakes on the distorting power of billionaires.

We can fix this. We must. The deadly crisis of Trump pillaging Greenland is just the tip of the iceberg if we don’t.

Subscribe now

Share

What I’m Reading:

• The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021, by investigative journalists Peter Baker and Susan Glasser.

  • I use Kindle to search books, like this one, for excerpts on key happenings, but now I am going to read the book from cover to cover.

• My book–I just finished the recording of the introduction and the publisher is preparing the full book for its audio release! I am over the moon about it!

• And, the Declaration of Independence, which is especially illuminating now as we bear witness to what Trump and his paramilitary force are doing to Minneapolis.

  • Many sentences jump out, including: “A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”

Support COURIER’s Journalism

Democracy dies behind a paywall, so our journalism is and will always be free to our readers.

But to be able to make that commitment, we need support from folks like you who believe in our mission and support our unique model.

Donate

Advertise in this newsletter

Do you or your company want to support COURIER’s mission and showcase your products or services to an aligned audience of 190,000+ subscribers at the same time? Contact advertising@couriernewsroom.com for more information.